Taylor Mathis with $Taylor chart Taylor Mathis with $Taylor chart. (Taylor Mathis on Instagram, CoinStats.)
By Andrew Bucholtz on

Taylor Mathis is back in the news.

In August, Audacy host Lucy Burdge went after Mathis for Mathis’ DraftKings-sponsored “walking bets” videos, which Burdge called “straight robbery from me” based on her history of doing those. Now, Mathis is being accused of manipulating the $TAYLOR cryptocurrency created around her.

Amidst blowback over that, she’s locked her X account and removed references to DraftKings from her bio there.

What exactly happened here? Well, Andrew O’Malley has a useful rundown at VegasSlotsOnline. Essentially, as per that piece, fans of Mathis made the $TAYLOR token based on her likeness, and she agreed to promote it in exchange for 20 million tokens, two percent of its total supply. She started promoting it on her X account (which has more than 200,000 followers) last week, leading to it reaching a $6 million market cap Saturday (which would have her stake worth an estimated $120,000).

On Sunday, as per O’Malley’s piece, Mathis responded to accusations she would “pump and dump” (promote it overall and then sell her own stake, which is a form of securities fraud) the currency with “I know what pump and dump is and that literally can’t happen”:

A Taylor Mathis tweet on the $TAYLOR cryptocurrency.
A Taylor Mathis tweet on the $TAYLOR cryptocurrency. (@PlusEVPenguin on X.)

But the value of the coin quickly dropped after Saturday, as this tracking chart from Coinstats shows, bringing its current market cap to just over $200,000.

The $TAYLOR Taylor Mathis currency's price from Oct. 19 to 25.
The $TAYLOR Taylor Mathis currency’s price from Oct. 19 to 25.

Things then seem to have become particularly weird, as O’Malley writes:

Reports suggest the Scottsdale-based Mathis dumped her entire holdings in the coin for 95 SOL ($16,350). This prompted another price plunge, with the market cap spiraling below $150,000.

There was yet another twist in the tale. Despite Taylor posting on X that crypto wasn’t for her and that she would donate any money gained to charity, she then proceeded to purchase another 34 million tokens for $9,000.

Those reported moves would give Mathis 1.5 times her initial stake and a profit of more than $7,000. And there have been a lot of people questioning if she was illegally manipulating the market, with some of them tagging DraftKings. And Mathis has locked down her account and removed DraftKings references from it. Here are some of those X posts discussing this:

It’s unclear what consequences there may be for Mathis from this. Awful Announcing reached out to DraftKings for comment, but did not hear back by publication time; we’ll update this post if that changes.

For the moment, Mathis’ X account remains private. And that’s certainly going to impact her ability to make her usual betting content. And while this is in some ways even sillier than the “walking bets” controversy, there are far more governmental rules on market actions and insider information than there are on making similar betting videos. So this could potentially wind up being a big problem for Mathis.

Update: DraftKings declined to comment.

Update 2: Mathis unlocked her X account and addressed the situation late Friday.

She also put out a video on this:

[VegasSlotsOnline]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz