Crypto site pays people to tattoo ads on themselves

A Florida man offered about $2,585 in cryptocurrency to a man in Chennai, India, to permanently tattoo a promotional message across his forehead — one of dozens of increasingly extreme tasks posted to a new bounty marketplace on Pump.fun, a platform known for facilitating the creation and trade of speculative digital tokens.

The man who received the tattoo, identified only as Arivu, walked into a beachside tattoo shop on Saturday and had the text inked on his forehead while filming the process, according to CNN. The bounty had been posted by a 21-year-old who identified himself as Ayush, who declined to give his last name.

Pump.fun specializes in so-called memecoins — digital tokens that carry no intrinsic value and depend entirely on viral attention to drive trading activity. The company recently launched a feature called Pump.fun GO, which allows users to offer cryptocurrency payments to anyone willing to complete tasks.

“Pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING,” the company wrote in a post on X.

The bounty system quickly attracted controversy, drawing criticism from researchers and public officials who said it exploited economically vulnerable people in developing countries. Many laborers in the Chennai region earn less than $10 per day, making an offer worth months of wages difficult to refuse, according to CNN.

A Toronto artist who uses the pseudonym Jordan said financial pressure led him to accept a bounty to tattoo a cryptocurrency casino advertisement on his leg.

“I’m struggling financially, and my girlfriend is a tattoo artist, so it was a little easier for me,” he told CNN. He said he plans to have the tattoo covered up, and described the memecoin ecosystem as one driven by “toxic acquisitiveness.”

The tattoo saga took an additional twist when Ayush ultimately refused to pay Arivu — arguing that he had misspelled the token name “bountywork” as “boutywork” in the original bounty description, and that Arivu had tattooed the misspelled version. The dispute circulated widely in crypto communities, spawning a separate memecoin called “$BOUTYWORK” that used Arivu’s image as its logo. Creator fees routed to Arivu through the token totaled roughly $15,000 to $17,500, according to multiple reports — well above the disputed original bounty. Whether Arivu received the full amount could not be confirmed.

Other bounties on the platform took a more openly dangerous turn. On the day the marketplace launched, a user reportedly posted the equivalent of $690,000 to someone who would film their own suicide, according to Unchained Crypto. That listing has since been removed.

Vetle Lunde, head of research at cryptocurrency analysis firm K33, said Pump.fun had a history of pushing boundaries. During the memecoin surge of 2024, the platform’s livestreams became associated with self-harm threats, animal abuse and other extreme content before the feature was suspended and later relaunched with updated moderation policies.

Nicholas Vrousalis, a philosophy professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam who wrote “Exploitation as Domination,” said the pattern was predictable.

“The greater the precarity and vulnerability of a given population, the higher the predatory instincts there are towards them,” Mr. Vrousalis said.

William Cavanaugh, a professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago, called it a case of “commodity fetishism” in which people are treated as products stripped of humanity. Mr. Cavanaugh invoked Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released in May, which addresses the protection of human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence and warns against ideologies that assign human worth based on productivity or efficiency.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called for legislation to address the platform, writing on X that she was offering a “bounty on the first bill introduced to ban this dystopian nightmare.” A spokesperson for Ms. Hochul said the administration was examining what role state-level law could play in restricting such services.

Ayush was direct about his motives.

“Im pushing this memecoin bountywork, and i made the coin so i get all fees,” he wrote in a message. “Im creating cool bounty’s for them to go viral and get more attention on the coin.”

When asked whether he expected anyone to complete the tattoo bounty, he said: “I was certain someone from a third world country would do it.”