What is shilling?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 4 min
In short
Shilling means promoting an asset while concealing your stake in it. The English word originally meant a decoy in a crowd. Promotion that hides payment reads as neutral opinion, which makes it worse than useless as input — and in Japan it can breach advertising disclosure rules.
Key points
- Promoting an asset while hiding your interest in it
- Originally English for a decoy in a crowd
- Undisclosed paid posts can breach advertising rules
- Talking up your own holdings counts too
Definition
Promoting a crypto asset without disclosing an interest in it — payment received, or a position held. The issue is that it recruits buyers under the appearance of neutral commentary.
Shilling takes two main forms. One is paid promotion — a fee per post, or a token allocation from the issuer. The other is talking up something you already hold, where new buyers lift the value of your own position. In both, the interest is invisible to the reader.
In Japan, advertising disguised as ordinary comment falls under the stealth-marketing rules of the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations. Since October 2023, a business's own message presented as a third party's impression is treated as a misleading representation, and crypto promotion is no exception.
What a reader can do is look for disclosure: is the post marked as advertising, does it say whether the writer holds the asset, can you trace what happened to the things this account promoted before? Where none of that is available, the post cannot be used as input regardless of whether it happens to be right.
Watch out for
- · A post with no advertising label may still be paid
- · 'I hold some' tells you neither how much nor since when
- · If you cannot trace past calls, there is no track record to check