Newly created token, BEN, launched a few days ago. But it really took off on Crypto Twitter when YouTuber Ben "Bitboy" Armstrong said he'd gotten involved on Monday.
On May 6th, Twitter user ben.eth, announced the contract address alongside the chart of the token trading against Wrapped Ether (WETH), as well as a newly created Telegram group.
As of Monday afternoon, the token had seen a lot of volatility. Its price soared 300% in the morning, only to drop 200% a few hours later, according to CoinMarketCap. So far, BEN appears to be trading on decentralized exchange Uniswap and has about $2 million worth of liquidity.
BEN has prompted famed crypto influencer Ben Armstrong, commonly known as BitBoy Crypto, to get involved, tweeting that the coin is live and that: “People all want to invest in themselves and now Bens can do that.”
"People think I launched the token. I had nothing to do with the creation. The creator, founder, & LP holder is ben.eth on Twitter," Armstrong told Decrypt. "This coin was spurred out of a telegram group consisting of only people named Ben. There are several high profile Bens in there like Ben Goertzel, Ben Lakeoff, Ben Noble and other respected Bens in the space."
He added that he's now joined the team that originally launched the token.
News of BitBoy’s comments comes amid ongoing legal battles he is facing for allegedly promoting infamous crypto exchange FTX. Armstrong is one of several influencers being sued in a class action suit by investors who lost money when the platform collapsed.
More recently, though, he made headlines for threatening tweets against the lawyers representing investors behind the lawsuit. As such, a judge ordered him to be blocked from engaging online with Adam Moskowitz, the attorney leading the case.
But the ongoing lawsuit has not stopped Armstrong from continuing to produce content, or getting involved in the launch of BEN. He still has a substantial online presence, with 1 million Twitter followers and 1.4 million YouTube subscribers.
For a while CoinMarketCap showed that BEN had a $16.5 million dollar market capitalization with a disclaimer that it couldn't be verified. Since then, the site has stopped displaying the market cap. At the time of writing, the token's 24-hour volume has topped $47 million.
BEN comes amid a recent craze led on by a spur of meme coins, with PEPE coin leading the way after surpassing a $1 billion dollar market cap. PEPE rose about $1 billion after Binance announced that it would add the token to its innovation zone, a section of the exchange that traders can access only after acknowledging that they could potentially lose a ton of money betting on memes and that it would be their fault if they did.