Justin Bieber is back in the news for all the wrong reasons. Now that his fans have said goodbye to his boyish charm and grudgingly accepted his 30 years, they also realize that Bieber has made some very adult mistakes. These include promoting a $1,600 NFT collection that is now trading below a low of $150.
Videos of Bieber have captured the public’s attention this week, especially those showing him spending a lot of one-on-one time with Sean “Diddy” Combs as a child. Video evidence of their interactions fueled his fanbase over concerns about possible sexual abuse, and a few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI agents raided Diddy’s mansions in Miami and Los Angeles following a series of lawsuits.
Bieber also attended, endorsed and briefly lived with Carl Lentz, the pastor of the disgraced Hillsong church. Lentz admitted to cheating on his wife for months, but despite this… Bieber supported Fanatical Hillsong and considered Lentz his Christian mentor.
Justin Bieber is promoting a doomed NFT collection
In another bad life decision, Bieber promoted the NFT collection inBetweeners in December 2021, and proclaimed that these were his “first NFTs.” He repeated this approval several times. The cost to create one NFT was 0.45 ETH ($1,600), but in the years since Bieber’s enthusiastic recommendations, the prices of those NFTs have fallen by more than 90%.
Read more: The NFT market bubble has burst and we have the charts to prove it
Bieber’s public Ethereum wallet paid above market rates during its launch phase; between $2,400 and $3,600. It didn’t take long for the collection to peak and during the last week of 2021, OpenSea sold 3,229 inBetweeners at an average price of 1.33 ETH ($4,800) per NFT.
Collectors have never seen those prizes since.
Today, those same NFTs are resold on OpenSea for less than $140 (0.04 ETH). Even excluding coin gas costs, in USD that is a 91% loss under the coin price or a 97% loss compared to the average price during the last week of 2021.
Worryingly, Bieber did not disclose his compensation while promoting the project on both Instagram and Twitter.
Read more: These six-figure NFTs are down 99%
Why Justin Bieber promoted inBetweeners NFTs
According to inBetweeners co-founder Gianpiero D’Alessandro, he met Bieber while Bieber and Ryan Good were working on the clothing brand House of Drew. D’Allessandro created illustrations for them, including a cartoon teddy bear that became the inspiration for inBetweeners NFTs.
Pasquale “Pavi” V. D’Avino recalled Bieber being excited about the collection. Bieber’s public wallet became one of the first to mint an NFT from the collection, and he posted about inBetweeners to his Instagram account’s 20 million followers. He also helped with details like creating an NFT collection roadmap.
Although Bieber barely uses X (formerly Twitter) and hasn’t even bothered posting in over a year, his seventh most recent tweet is about inBetweeners. That, of course, was at the top of the bubble: a December 22, 2021 retweet from the inBetweeners Discord chat.
Since, inBetweeners is down 97% in ETH terms.
Basically, Bieber was promoting an NFT collection at the most expensive price possible. Depending on whether you list in USD and whether you calculate based on the coin price or the high price, every long-term holder has lost at least 90% of their purchase price. Bieber was even spotted at an inBetweeners event in 2022 as the price steadily collapsed.
Like many of his decisions, things have only gotten worse since then.