Preface: The purpose of this article is not to attack Data Dash for making money, in fact I’m happy for him. The point is instead to make sure readers are critical of where they get their information. The story below is not unique to Data Dash or his channel. It happens all across the crypto space on channels and well respected websites as well as TV business channels all the time. – JC

Popular YouTube crypto personality DataDash (Nicholas Merten) has recently posted a mea culpa video where he admits to being paid nearly $300K in return for promoting Substratum on his channel without disclosing it to his viewers as is required by FTC regulations. In the apology video, where he deems it so heartfelt he couldn’t bring himself to make his trademark finger snap at the beginning, he says he was approached by someone on the Substratum team and offered a payment of 6 Ethereum and 100K Substratum tokens, which he accepted before promoting the coin several times on his channel. No disclosure was ever given that he was paid to promote the coin and several of his videos that highlighted his “coins to watch” heavily featured Substratum for months.

He claims he planned on making the promotional videos anyway because he liked the project so much, however in a subsequent video he also visited the offices of Substratum where he made yet another breathless promotional video for the coin. He didn’t mention whether he planned on visiting the offices before the payment as well.

The video features Data Dash apologizing for nearly 15 minutes straight about how guilty he feels for misleading his fans and he wants to make things right by donating his proceeds to charity.

But the story of DataDash and his shilling takes a bizarre turn when during the video he claims he has lost ALL of the Substratum tokens he was paid due to some poorly explained hard drive failure he experienced. Tokens that were recently worth $300K, if he had not lost them as he claims.

What makes his “lost coins” story seem dubious is that earlier in the video, he claimed that due to overwhelming guilt and to make amends for his paid shilling, he would be re-buying the 6 Ethereum he was given and then give that to charity. A total of about $6K at current prices. However, the larger payment he received, the 100K Substratum tokens worth almost $300K that he claimed he lost will not be part of any charitable contribution. Overall, he seemed pretty relaxed for a guy who lost over a quarter million dollars. Especially for a guy who earlier in the year said he was working as an intern, so $300K is a lot of money to just lose.







Now, I am all for people making money. However, if you are giving people trading advice, but it turns out you make more money being a shill than actual trading, it means maybe you shouldn’t be teaching people how to trade, but instead teach them how to start a YouTube channel so they can shill coins for big money as that seems to be where Data Dash’s true talents are.

But his story about losing the coins makes no sense whatsoever. On top of that, if someone who deems themselves a “crypto expert” loses $300K worth of crypto, it means you shouldn’t be taking their advice on security or a host of other issues related to crypto. If his story is indeed true, it means he has lost more money in crypto than he probably made. Is this the guy you want to take advice from, a guy who has lost more than he made during one of the biggest bull markets of all time?

But even more troubling, at the end of the apology video he alluded to some sort of global trip he plans on taking and hopes to meet his fans along his travels. Of course, traveling the world is what people usually do after losing $300K and working as an unpaid intern just a few months prior.

But as I said earlier, I am all for people making money and while DataDash probably did break certain FTC regulations regarding paid promotion, I don’t blame him for what he did and have no personal issue with it at all. But what I want to do is help my readers be critical when evaluating who they are getting information from. If someone is spending more time making videos and building a YouTube channel, it probably means they are making more money from that than from their trading.