Did rapper YG just flex a $30M Bitcoin stack in his new music video?

Published at: March 25, 2022

Keenon Dequan Ray Jackson, the rapper who goes by the name YG appears to show off a fat $30 million stack of Bitcoin (BTC) in his latest music video.

The reveal appears to either be an eye-watering — but possibly fake — flex, or a crafty bit of product placement, as a cold storage device from crypto wallet provider Ledger is featured prominently in the video. The social team from Ledger was on it immediately too:

We see you! @YG knows how to secure those bags of #bitcoin … not your keys, no your coins.

— Ledger (@Ledger) February 11, 2022

In one of the scenes of the music video for the song titled “Scared Money” featuring J. Cole and Moneybagg Yo, YG is seen holding a Ledger wallet close to a smartphone which has a screen bearing a wallet app with more than $30.6 million worth of BTC in it.

While the image could have easily been faked, rappers are well known for flaunting their wealth and success, especially so in this song which has a theme focused on spending money, investing and wearing half a million dollars worth of jewelry around one's neck.

YG is quite the BTC proponent, as he has mentioned owning digital gold in multiple other songs such as “Big Bank” from 2018, and also in an interview with RollingStone from mid-2021.

During that interview YG said that he liked the simplicity of hodling crypto as he could invest his money into the asset class without being distracted from his music career. He drew comparisons to the real estate market, where he would have to spend a lot time working and learn to do it successfully.

“I f*ck with Bitcoin. [...] I got Ethereum recently and I got Dogecoin recently but I’ve had Bitcoin for about three years. [...] Bitcoin came around and it was like ‘what?’ and I can just do it and it turns into that?” he said in reference to the booming price of the asset last year.

In a Reddit post on the r/Bitcoin Reddit community earlier today, users were questioning YG’s mammoth BTC stack, with AvoidMyRange stating that “the chance of all these ending at 0 and the cents ending in .00 is incredibly low. This is obviously fake.”

“It is fake because that isn’t even the layout of the ledger app,” user AKeveryday responded.

Other users saw the funny side of YG’s music-based BTC antics, with Redditor Lexstell11 doing the math on the lyrics from the Big Bank song when BTC was priced around the mid $7,000 range.

“In YG’s song Big Bank, he says ‘I might buy her red bottoms with the crypto- 3 coins that’ll pay your whole semester…’ the song was released on 5/25/2018 when BTC was $7,459 at close. So presumably YG paid $132,000 by today’s conversion for a girl's semester at what I’m assuming was University of Phoenix. I think about this a lot.”

Crypto has attracted a strong cohort of rappers over recent years, with icons such as Jay Z and NFT-bull Snoop Dogg both making heavy plays in the sector. Other well-known figures to jump on the gravy train include Meek Mill who snapped up Dogecoin amid the hype last year, Nas who tokenized his music as NFTs earlier this year, and Post Malone who featured a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in one of his recent music videos.