JaRule/Photo courtesy of Rolling Stone
Ja Rule, who narrowly escaped prosecution after the defunct Fyre Festival, is creating his own business that includes cryptocurrency and an NFT platform.
The rapper just launched a non-fungible token (NFT) platform with Robert Testagrossa and engineer James Cropcho. The platform is called Flipkick.io and is geared toward creators monetizing their work in the form of NFT, reported RevoltTv.
In 2020, Ja Rule signed a deal with Roll, an Ethereum-based protocol that lets content creators control their own platforms using cryptocurrency.
Although cryptocurrency has shown to result in substantial gains, even for the most casual partakers, and is a good business strategy for Ja Rule, there is just one caveat that may affect a full buy-in from prospective consumers.
Ja Rule was a significant player in the Fyre Festival. The festival was touted as a luxury music festival founded by serial conman Billy McFarland and Ja Rule.
Tickets were sold at the cost of up to $100,000, and guests were promised luxury accommodations and including top-notch cuisine, art and music in the Bahamas. They ended up sleeping in tents on water-logged mattresses and being served cheese sandwiches.
McFarland was sentenced to prison for fraud for six years. Ja Rule’s lawyers successfully argued that McFarland merely used his name to promote the festival, and he was not in concert with McFarland’s scheme. He was a defendant in a $100 million class-action lawsuit about the matter, but his part in it was also dismissed.
In addition, Ja Rule also has multi-year ongoing issues with the Internal Revenue Service.
This time around, Ja Rule has partnered with someone who is of better repute than McFarland was. Testagrossa has
a resume that demonstrates enough financial knowledge to make this business appear legitimate. Further, the U.S. Treasury has reinforced its efforts to hold banking and other financial service sectors accountable, particularly cryptocurrency.In a move that may be too ironic to fathom, one of Ja Rule’s first sales on Flipkick was a piece of art from Fyre Festival’s old headquarters.