Ric Flair is doing something with crypto now
The 16-time world champion wrestler is returning to North Carolina this weekend with another new product. So if you buy it, what do you get?
So here’s some news:
Ric Flair is going to be back in Charlotte this weekend for an AEW wrasslin’ show in Bojangles Coliseum. Here is some more news: Ric Flair built Charlotte. He and Richard Petty, actually. The source for this information: Ric Flair, who said so in the video above.
Here is EVEN MORE NEWS: As of January 1, Ric Flair has his own cryptocurrency somethingerother:
It’s called Wooooo! Coin. With five o’s.
Before we go on here, it’s important for me to state that I am not a financial advisor, nor is this financial advice. For the record, Ric Flair has stated the same thing. Here’s what he says in a disclaimer in the pitch deck for Wooooo! Coin:
I am excited about its potential, but keep in mind that I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice.
Go on.
Because I hold Wooooo Coin and have let the Wooooo Coin Project use my name and image, telling you about my participation could be considered a direct or indirect promotional activity for Wooooo Coin.
Okay. Flair says that because he’s considered a “Founder,” he gets a cut of the fees associated with any sale of Wooooo Coin, along with 0.5% for the use of his name and image. There are 10 billion Wooooo Coins out there, which, technically, are tokens on the Etherium network. I am not going to get into the weeds here, partially because I’m not a crypto guy, and partially because this is not really a story about crypto, it’s a story about Ric Flair. The disclaimer says as much:
The value of my Wooooo Coin may increase, including due to promotional activities, and I may from time to time sell or stop promoting Wooooo Coin, which may cause the price to fall.
So, at this point, you may be wondering what, exactly, a Wooooo Coin does. According to the website people who buy them get access to exclusive merch and free Wooooo! Energy Drinks. Plus, you can “ride the WOOOOO! wave.” (?) But further down the home page comes this sober statement, placed next to a warning emoji:
This meme coin is designed as a commemorative token for the sake of nostalgia and hence, is intrinsically useless.
Ah, well then, is it a good investment?
This project is for entertainment purposes only and should not be viewed as an investment.
So, after all of that, let’s say I wanted to buy some Wooooo Coin. Of course, I’m an American Citiz—
Purchasing this meme coin is not permitted for residents and citizens of the United States.
I should note: Some people are buying Wooooo Coin: There have been 314 transactions in 3 days, according to a dashboard on the home page, and more than half of the tokens have been snapped up. It’s also (as of Thursday morning) holding a value of about a tenth of a penny per token, according to the tracker on the website. Past that, it’s hard to tell exactly who else is behind this. The website says it’s an offering of the Jenkins Group Foundation of Panama City (Panama, not Florida). I wish I could say more about them, but the Jenkins Group has literally no other presence online. It’s not often that you plug something into Google and get only one result.
Anyhow, I’ll let a post from Dailycoin sum this all up: “While the WOOOOO! Coin is cleverly branded around Flair’s bombastic persona … it’s hard to see it as anything other than a revenue-focused offering.”
Is this Flair’s first foray into finance? No! In 2007, just before the real estate bubble burst, he, his then wife Tiffany, and a business associate named Chris Porter launched “Ric Flair Finance,” which offered what it called a “Figure-4 Loan Process.”
It didn’t last long. Porter sued Flair over an unpaid loan (whose real name is Richard Fleihr) and, according to a 2011 Grantland story:
According to Fliehr’s response to the lawsuit … Porter told Fliehr that they didn’t need a lender or broker license to start the online company, which would generate leads and pass them to lenders for a fee. Fliehr advertised the company on WWE television broadcasts and before a NASCAR race in Delaware. When RFF finally launched, the “business model … turned out to be completely illegal.” North Carolina shut down the company for noncompliance.
The Grantland story used court documents and other public records to exhaustively detail Flair’s massive debts around Charlotte and beyond, fueled by four divorces and a larger-than-life lifestyle. Back in 2020, Flair said he had a million dollars in the bank, and that “everything is paid for.” Still, the unassailable mystique had worn off of Flair in the same fashion as it had worn off of the late Jerry Richardson. We’re all simultaneously capable of great and terrible things. Flair has just done exponentially more of those great and terrible things than most people.
I’ll admit: An earlier version of me was fascinated by Ric Flair. I first met him in 2011, when he and Mick Foley visited the television station in Charlotte where I worked. In 2013, I interviewed him about his 1995 trip to North Korea. He seemed … subdued. He was nothing like the bombastic personality of his promos. I’d also seen him around town a handful of times. He cut me off in traffic on Woodlawn Road. I saw him walking down a sidewalk at SouthPark mall. In some ways, it was more fun to catch Flair in mundane, everyday settings around town. Back in the early days of Twitter, I started a hashtag, #RicFlairSighting, to chronicle the times when people would bump into him at, say, the grocery store.
A few years ago, after Flair moved from North Carolina to suburban Atlanta, I wrote about the quaint time when a Ric Flair sighting was a rite of Charlotte passage. Long before cryptocurrency, a personal Flair story was a form of social currency in town. That currency is no long being minted. Charlotte and Flair had taken what had once made them interesting or unique and turned them into commodities.
Hence, Wooooo Coin now exists. So do Wooooo Wings (here’s how you pronounce that). So does Ric Flair Drip, a Nature Boy-branded personal cannabis line. Flair has trademarked his name and his catchphrase (which, officially, has five o’s). Those are the things that sell other things including, now, crypto. “By purchasing WOOOOO! Coin,” the token’s website says, “you are of the sound understanding that there is neither expectation, nor guarantee of financial gain.” Stylin', profilin', limousine riding, and jet flying have a price after all.
Simply sad. He, the wooooo and well, everything.
If you believe wrasslin is a sport, then you might belive Flair knows crypto.