On Monday morning, Eric Adams held a press conference near Times Square, ditching his much-used “NYC Mayor” baseball hat for one that read “$NYC,” to announce his first act after the mayoralty: a crypto token. “This is going to address many of the issues we are facing not only in this city but in cities in America,” he said.
By Monday afternoon, the Adams’s coin had briefly surged in value before an account linked to its issuer pulled out a ton of money out of $NYC, tanking the token’s value for a quick profit—and fueling widespread outrage and accusations that Adams was ripping people off. Now, a former Adams crypto adviser (and Catholic knight) has entered the drama claiming that Adams stole the idea for $NYC coin in the first place.
Adams has been boosting cryptocurrency in New York for years, even taking his first paycheck as mayor in bitcoin four years ago. But his initial announcement on Monday was still a surprise: This was his first business venture as a private citizen — a meme coin with a mission to, as he put it, “fight antisemitism and anti-Americanism”? He was confident in the new investment opportunity. “We’re about to change the game,” he posted on X that afternoon.
Perhaps he was just playing the game. Less than an hour after $NYC token’s trading launch, Adams was fighting allegations that he had engaged in a rug pull. A time-tested (and difficult to prosecute) scam in cryptocurrency, a rug pull happens when someone with a public platform creates a coin and promotes it to increase its perceived value. Then, when it seems to be at its highest in value, the coin creator pulls their own liquidity, tanking the price and leaving everyone else in the lurch. With Adams’s coin, the market cap rose to as high as $600 million on Monday afternoon, before an account linked to the $NYC issuer took out around $2.5 million worth of liquidity. According to the analytics platform Bubblemaps, around 200 traders lost over $1,000 in the alleged rug pull. An unlucky 15 accounts lost over $100,000.
An Adams spokesperson denied the rug pull allegations and claimed that the former mayor did not move investor funds. A spokesperson for $NYC said that the collapse came after its “market maker made adjustments” to its liquidity — causing the perception of a rug pull even though it swears it wasn’t that. Neither of those explain why the account that withdrew the $2.5 million subsequently returned $1.5 million of the funds, according to publicly available blockchain data.
Crypto is designed to obscure the ownership of any given account, so it remains unclear who was responsible for the “liquidity adjustment” that caused Adams’s coin to plummet in value. But former Adams staffers and crypto advisers were not thrilled by the developments. The billionaire and longtime Adams crypto whisperer Brock Pierce told the New York Times that Adams’s $NYC team “did not have any of the necessary experience” to pull this off. Adams’s former deputy press secretary, Jonah Allon, wrote on X that the whole thing was “tawdry and unethical.”
Former Adams crypto adviser Eddie Cullen is going a step further. Cullen says he intends to pursue legal action to stop Adams from further promoting the $NYC token; he claims he presented the idea to Adams early last year. Cullen is a crypto founder working on a Catholic stablecoin who was initiated last year into the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a chivalric order under the Pope that was established during the Crusades. He also ran for New York City mayor in 2021. Reached by phone at his home in Tennessee, where he has since moved, Cullen said the idea for $NYC was “butchered for short-term gain without any long-term sustainability vision.”
Legal action could help reveal who worked with Adams on the $NYC rollout. As of now, the big clue is the LLC paperwork for the token which was filed by Yosef Zvieli, the businessman who filed the paperwork for the LLC behind $NYC. Zvieli is a landlord and developer accused of leasing student housing inundated with mold and sewage. In past lawsuits, Zvieli has hired Frank Carone, the Brooklyn powerbroker who once served as Adams’s chief of staff. ABC News also reports that Carone was involved in the launch. (Carone and Zvieli did not respond to requests for comment.)
As of Thursday afternoon, the $NYC account on X is still posting what looks like an AI-generated promo; the crypto wallet that returned $1.5 million of its funds into the coin is still holding on to the other $1 million. Cullen expects that the owner of the wallet will slowly try to take the funds out as the attention dies down. “It hasn’t been moved because it seems like they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,” he said. “If this was a rug pull — which it is — I think they got 70 percent to 80 percent of the way there.”
Adams is also in the news for another incident. After a flight to Dallas soon after launching $NYC, the former mayor was accosted on a jet bridge by a woman in a mask. “Go fuck yourself,” he told her, in the incident caught on video. “The old days are over,” he added. “You’re going to see the Brooklyn in me.”
