Serve the Coin like a Sirloin

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Two unlikely parties that have come together recently are the worlds of hip hop and crypto, a match no one expected yet seems painfully obvious now that they’ve found one other. What’s quite interesting is that one would expect the engagement to be limited to simply investing and earning, but various music titans are getting much more involved.

Music brings yet another way to encourage ongoing adoption and interest in the global market. Today, let’s go through a number of household names and how they’re bringing in a new kind of green.

Aww Diggity

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Snoop Dogg is an OG of the entire West Coast hip hop scene. The rapper has made a long-term effort to get involved with blockchain and his presence is well appreciated amongst investors. Top 5 coin Ripple hosted a Blockchain Week party in NYC and featured Snoop Dogg, and his performance is lauded as a major breakthrough in mainstream music. He’s gone on to perform for more crypto-centric events including SparkleCoin’s recent gala and received an honorarium of of $55,000 USD’s worth of SparkleCoin, which he then donated to his youth football league.

But that's not all. This past January, Snoop Dogg tweeted out his support for Robinhood, an app that features trading between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Robinhood stands to be one of the most the promising exchange apps this year, built on an already successful platform, so the involvement of Snoop might just get you to smoke weed trade crypto everyday.

YG

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YG's recent banger Big Bank features multiple big time rappers 2 Chainz, Big Sean, and Nicki Minaj. For the most part, the song is simply about raking in and using all the wealth, but interestingly there are a few bars where crypto is mentioned:

• Source

I might buy her red bottoms with the crypto
Three coins, that'll pay ya whole semester.. - YG

It seems that even YG seems to know how much BTC is worth, rapping about how even a few coins are worth as much as college tuition for a whole semester! Getting the vocabulary of cryptocurrencies into mainstream music is invaluable for indirect education and exposure.

Nas

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Nas proved again to be ahead of his time when he trusted in the future of cryptocurrencies and crypto-transactions. Before it blew up, Nas gambled a big investment into Coinbase back in 2014 when it was still a young startup company. Now that Coinbase has grown to be one of the premiere transaction wallet platforms for cryptocurrency, Nas has made his sizeable share from Coinbase's success.

• Can you pass Coinbase's Nas Test? Source

Akon

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Rapper Akon is starting a huge project that can redefine how we think about financing new cities in third-world countries. Akon is building a city in Senegal that is funded completely by his own cryptocurrency named Akoin. This city will be built on 2,000 acres of land, which was gifted to him by the Senegalese President, Macky Sall. Akon believes that cryptocurrency will be the solution that brings power back to the people in Africa in order to advance themselves apart from the government.

Prospects like these are what have gotten many countries outside the Western world more interested in blockchain. More visionaries are understanding the capacity to create whole new systems from scratch and leverage crypto in a way still unfathomable in the US or Europe.

Check the full article on his project here!

50 Cent

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For 50 Cent, he made infamous ties with the cryptocurrency world almost by happenstance. For the release of his Animal Ambition LP, he accepted Bitcoin as payment. That earned BTC is rumored to have hit millions in value today, making him the biggest accident when it comes to cryptocurrency.

The Next Verse

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If you’re interested in how more rappers have commented on or been somewhat involved in the world of blockchain and crypto, we recommend checking out this recent article by XXL. Their compilation contains even stranger ways rappers like Kanye and Childish Gambino have been associated with the new technology. It looks like this new relationship is here to stay and we're looking forward to the musical revolution.

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cover image illustrated by @zsolt.vidak

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