A trio of celebrities have settled lawsuits against them related to endorsement deals with failed crypto exchange FTX before it collapsed last year.
Trevor Lawrence, an NFL quarterback for the Jacksonville Jaguars, has reportedly settled a lawsuit accusing him of misleading FTX investors for an undisclosed sum. YouTubers Tom Nash and Kevin Paffrath also agreed to a settlement, but the terms were not disclosed.
These developments were first reported by Bloomberg News.
Before FTX collapsed, Lawrence had signed a sponsorship deal with Blockfolio, an FTX subsidiary, in 2021 filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court On August 31, Lawrence received $205,555.35 from the company.
At the time, Sina Nader, the then COO of FTX, said Decipher that sponsorships with Lawrence and other celebrities helped “officially break” taboos around cryptocurrencies.
“When it comes to my crypto portfolio, I wanted a long-term partner in the space that I could trust,” Lawrence said at the time of the Blockfolio deal. The athlete did not comment on the comparison or the Bloomberg report.
Nash, a popular YouTube influencer with 289,000 subscribers, was also paid by FTX for an endorsement, according to a Class action lawsuit The Moskowitz law firm filed a lawsuit against him and other influencers in March.
After FTX collapsed, the complaint says, Nash and other influencers purged their channels of any content that promoted the company or its disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Nash, who is an Australian citizen, did not initially respond to the lawsuit, prompting Moskowitz to ask a federal judge to serve the lawsuit via tweet.
Paffrath, another influencer with a following of 1.88 million subscribers on his YouTube channel “Meet Kevin,” admitted in one Video from November 17, 2022 that he was previously sponsored by FTX, which he described as a “scar” that he regretted.
In one second video On March 16, a day after his inclusion in the Moskowitz class action lawsuit, Paffrath reiterated that he held SBF responsible for the fraud. He described claims that influencers contributed to FTX fraud losses as “ridiculous.”
These three are part of a longer list of celebrities that FTX worked to promote before its demise. Others facing trial over a partnership with the exchange include former NFL quarterbacks Tom Brady, his ex-wife Gisele Bundchenformer NBA player Shaquille O’Neilland tennis star Naomi Osaka.
News of the settlements came after FTX was hit by a cyberattack that briefly shut down an online portal for former customers to submit refund claims. Now a federal judge authorized FTX to begin selling the $3.4 billion in Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin and other assets as part of the bankruptcy process.
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