Web3 influencer Nicole Benham, a former journalist with bylines in the Los Angeles Business Journal and The Hollywood Reporter, was at the center of the latest NFT "pump and dump."

Benham spent the past few days discussing Dogecoin founder Billy Markus's latest project, Blocky Doge 3. The "media personality" could be found responding to tweets and joining Twitter Spaces promoting the collection with insights such as "no roadmap or utility?" followed by the "eyes" emoji and "here's the alpha, the founder of Dogecoin is dropping a dog NFT collection pretty soon."

"There's a lot to be excited about; that's all I'm saying," Benham said, adding that she just wanted everyone in the NFT community to get in on it because she heard it was a free mint. Some tweets have since been deleted, although several Crypto Twitter sleuths have receipts. 

Markus pitched the collection as having "no roadmap, no utility, no anything, just ugly pixel art jpegs of degen dog avatars." The public mint went live at 3 p.m. EDT on April 11, with existing Blocky holders getting access an hour earlier. 

Benham received 250 Blocky Doge 3 NFTs into a wallet she controlled. She promptly sold 220 of these at the same price — obliterating the collection's floor price (the value of the cheapest NFTs in the collection). The floor price has fallen about 56% in ether terms, down to 0.0371 ETH from 0.0845 ETH on April 11. The profits from the sales were about 20 ether, worth around $38,000 at the time. 

(by Adam Morgan McCarthy)