Will Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis Do An Apology Video After the SEC Filed Charges Against Their NFT Comedy Grift?
For everything they’re charged with, maybe the most significant crime is that, with the combined creative power of Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Seth MacFarlane, Chris Rock and Jane Fonda, no one could come up with a better name for their harebrained, bullshit, NFT-focused and funded webseries than Stoner Cats.
The world of the crypto enthusiasts have long been trying to find ways to legitimize their wasteful and impractical gambling hobby by attaching the digital coins and tokens to something exciting and sexy. The fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange FTX enlisted a veritable Vanity Fair afterparty to hawk their platform, earning Larry David the title of “Unintentional Nostradamus” when a Super Bowl commercial in which he comically trashed the company went viral after its collapse. The L.A. Lakers, Kings and Clippers play in the Crypto.com Arena, so named for the struggling company that made Matt Damon tell us “fortune favors the brave” before we lost all our money.
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Mila Kunis, however, took a more hands-on approach with her celebrity crypto endorsement when her company Orchard Farm Productions partnered with the creators of the Stoner Cats NFTs to make a web series about the cannabis-loving cartoon cats starring a bunch of her Hollywood friends that would sell access to episodes in the form of the NFTs themselves. Today, The SEC charged Stoner Cats 2 LLC for an unregistered offering and ordered them to pay $1 million back to their so-called “investors.” What if Kunis and Kutcher just wrote them a nice letter instead?
“Regardless of whether your offering involves beavers, chinchillas or animal-based NFTs, under the federal securities laws, it’s the economic reality of the offering — not the labels you put on it or the underlying objects — that guides the determination of what’s an investment contract and therefore a security,” Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, wrote in a statement as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter.
Grewal explained, “Here, the SEC’s order finds that Stoner Cats marketed its knowledge of crypto projects, touted that the price of their NFTs could increase and took other steps that led investors to believe they would profit from selling the NFTs in the secondary market. It’s therefore hardly surprising, as the order finds, that Stoner Cats sold its entire supply of NFTs in just 35 minutes, generating proceeds of over $8 million, most of which were then resold — not held as collectibles — in the secondary market within months.”
Unlike most crypto schemes, however, Kunis and Stoner Cats did deliver on their promise to actually make the web series: NFT buyers were treated to seven episodes of the animated cartoon comedy, which were met with a lukewarm critical response.
Maybe an apology video would help?
