Shilled: How Influencers Get Paid
Shilling didn't start with crypto, but crypto turned it into an industry with its own rate cards and payment infrastructure. Here's how it actually works.
Somebody you trust just told you a coin is going to the moon. Before you act on that, it is worth asking a much older question than anything crypto invented. Who is paying them, and how much?
Shilling did not start with crypto, but crypto turned it into an industry with its own rate cards, tiers, and payment infrastructure. This is the article about how that industry actually works, who has gotten burned publicly for playing along, and how you tell a genuinely good project from a paid performance when, as many readers have noticed, so much of this is subjective.
The Business Of Believing In A Coin
Crypto projects, especially newer ones with real marketing budgets, do not rely on organic word of mouth if they can help it. They buy attention the same way any consumer brand does, except the product is a token and the endorsement carries a much bigger legal shadow than a skincare ad.
A 2022 list posted by an anonymous blockchain analyst, reported by CNBC, claimed some crypto YouTubers charged as much as sixty-five thousand dollars for a single promotional video. Last year, a leaked price sheet published by the on chain investigator known as ZachXBT showed more than 200 crypto influencers organized into five tiers based on how much they charge, with the highest documented single payment landing at sixty thousand dollars to one creator, verified by an actual transaction hash. That creator later admitted to taking the payment, framing it publicly as broader marketing work rather than a single sponsored post, and conceded he probably should have disclosed it once the posts turned into presale promotion.
That is the quiet part. Most of this money moves through private deals, wallet transfers, and vague labels like consulting or marketing that never show up as a clearly disclosed ad. The audience has no way of knowing the poster has already been paid, and often no way of knowing they still hold a bag they are trying to offload onto exactly the people reading the post.
The People Who Got Caught
This is not hypothetical. Regulators have made examples out of some very famous names.
Kim Kardashian agreed to pay 1.26 million dollars in penalties, disgorgement, and interest to settle SEC charges, without admitting or denying them, for promoting EthereumMax without disclosing she was paid to do it. Floyd Mayweather Jr. is a defendant in an investor class action over promotion of the same project, which was dismissed in 2022, refiled, and allowed to proceed as state-level classes in August 2025. The claims are allegations, and he has contested them. Paul Pierce settled with the SEC over similar undisclosed touting. Ben Armstrong, the YouTuber known as BitBoy Crypto, was named in lawsuits alleging he promoted tokens and platforms that later collapsed, including the FTX class action, and he has denied promoting FTX. And after FTX fell apart, a group of finance YouTubers, including some well known names in the personal finance space, got named in a billion dollar class action alleging they promoted FTX accounts without disclosing what they were paid to do it.
The common thread in every one of these cases is not that the coin was bad, though most of them were. It is that money changed hands and nobody told the audience. Under the SEC’s anti touting provision, when the token is a security, that is not just a moral failure. It is a securities law violation, as the Kardashian and Pierce settlements show. The FTC separately expects paid endorsements to be clearly disclosed, and although its Endorsement Guides do not carry the force of law on their own, violations can lead to enforcement actions and, in some cases, civil penalties of more than fifty thousand dollars per violation. A single undisclosed thread with a dozen posts can rack up real liability fast.
How To Spot It
None of this requires forensic skill. A few patterns repeat constantly enough to be worth memorizing.
Watch the account behind the hype, not just the hype itself. A sudden wave of enthusiasm from accounts created in the last month, all with oddly similar follower counts, is a near textbook sign of a coordinated push rather than organic belief.
Listen for the absence of risk. Genuine bullish analysis usually talks about token unlocks, competitors, and what could go wrong. Pure shilling almost never does, because acknowledging downside would undercut the pitch.
Watch what insiders are actually doing while the hype builds. If social volume around a token is spiking while large wallets are quietly moving funds out, that mismatch between what people are saying and what money is actually doing is one of the more reliable signals available, and it is visible on chain to anyone who looks.
And here is the part worth sitting with, because it is easy to miss. The simple fact that someone is telling you a coin is going to be great is not evidence of anything on its own. It might be true. It might be a paid post. It might be someone talking their own book because they are sitting on a bag they need you to help them exit. Certainty and enthusiasm are cheap to produce and cost the person producing them almost nothing if they turn out to be wrong. Treat strong conviction from a stranger on the internet as neutral information at best, not as research you get to skip.
Telling Good From Bad, Knowing It Is Subjective
There is no formula that removes judgment from this, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of shill. But a few things separate projects worth real attention from projects built purely to be sold.
Does the team have a track record that predates this token, under names that can actually be checked? Is there a working product you can use today, not a roadmap promising one? Is the tokenomics structure public, including how much supply insiders hold and whether it is locked? Does anyone talking about the project ever mention a real risk, a competitor, or a reason it might fail? And does the promotion around it feel proportional to what the project has actually built, or does the marketing spend appear to be doing all the work the product should be doing instead?
None of that guarantees anything. Good marketing does not make a project bad, and a quiet project is not automatically honest. But a project that can only survive on borrowed enthusiasm from people getting paid to supply it is telling you something true about itself, whether it means to or not.
There can be only one coin that actually delivers what today’s loudest post promised. The other ones are just renting your attention until the campaign budget runs out.