Sold a beachside paradise with A-list models including Kendall Jenner, millennials swarmed to the Bahamas in 2017 for the ill-fated Fyre Festival.

We all know what happened next: Wrecked local businesses, dilapidated cheese sandwiches and deceived customers who formed a class-action lawsuit against organizers who used their money to bankroll decadent lifestyles. At the core of the media circus was the role of influencer marketing. Having failed to properly vet the new concept or disclose financial relationships to Fyre, celebrities poneyed up after government agencies came knocking. Jenner, for instance, was forced to pay $90,000 out of pocket for her role in promoting the festival.

Nemo Yang is the Founder and CEO of Oxygen, the Web3 marketing platform.

From the tropical environment to the dynastic celebrity families involved, Fyre Festival mirrors the FTX meltdown and other prominent crypto scandals that have blown up these past few months. Despite the lack of regulatory clarity surrounding crypto, much less the compliance scrutiny that traditional financial institutions face, Tom Brady gave FTX his seal of approval as Sam Bankman-Fried’s team proceeded to lose billions of dollars while racking up $55,000 bar tabs at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville in the Bahamas. Kendall Jenner’s half-sister, Kim Kardashian, likewise found herself in the crosshairs of regulators and had to pay a $1.26 million fine for promoting ethereumMax – essentially, a pump-and-dump scheme. In a further twist of irony, the land in Great Exuma where Billy McFarland held Fyre is now being sold as non-fungible token (NFT) parcels, marketed towards crypto heads by the same developers behind Miami Beach’s Setai hotel.

Celebrities, and their managers who present advertising opportunities, owe a responsibility to fans and followers to properly vet products and services, and to actually understand what they’re promoting. While most builders in Web3 understand the risks of investing in cryptocurrency projects and have some lay of the land regarding DeFi architecture, it’s unlikely that Kim Kardashian's 228 million Instagram followers are well-versed in topics like portfolio allocation. They are sheep being led to the slaughter by someone who has never even ventured an opinion on Ethereum.