Nigerian singer Davido, with a massive following of over 15.3 million on X and 7.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify, has become the latest celebrity entangled in a meme coin rug-pull scandal. The incident is allegedly masterminded by Sahil Arora, an Indian national accused of orchestrating several similar pump-and-dump schemes.

On May 29, Davido launched a meme coin named “DAVIDO” with the tagline, “The pump stops when time stops.” According to chain tracker Lookonchain, the coin was created on the Solana memecoin generator platform pump.fun, with an initial funding of 7.5 SOL. Of this, 7 SOL was used to purchase 203 million DAVIDO tokens, making up 20.3% of the total supply.

Davido heavily promoted the token to his followers on X, encouraging them to hold onto the token with the anticipation that it would reach a $30 million market cap. However, just 11 hours later, he sold 121.88 million DAVIDO tokens for 2,791 SOL, which was worth approximately $474,000 at that time. This massive sell-off caused the token's price to plummet by over 90% from its peak of $0.003297. At the time of writing, DAVIDO is trading at $0.002343, down 37% from its all-time high.

Adding to the suspicion of a rug pull, Lookonchain reported a transfer of 20 million DAVIDO tokens to an address labeled as “dead1111…1111.” Despite the mounting concerns, Davido has yet to address the situation publicly.

The scandal involving celebrity-themed tokens is not isolated. This week saw several instances of similar tokens being dumped on investors. For example, American media personality Caitlyn Jenner launched a SOL-based meme coin called JENNER on pump.fun, only for its price to crash shortly after developers dumped large quantities of pre-acquired tokens. Sahil Arora was later identified as the orchestrator behind this incident, exploiting