What the hell is Marshall Rogan Inu ($MRI)? Fighters and fans alike are starting to hear more and more around it, and the buzz is growing. However, let’s take a step back.
Let’s be honest. Cryptocurrency is not, currently, for the faint of heart. In fact, most mainstream people could not give an explanation of the blockchain technology it is built on, or anything even close. So, for now, we will just assume that cryptocurrency is essentially computer code that acts as a digital property that cannot be easily replicated. It is typically referred to as “coins”. These coins can be traded on both centralized and decentralized exchanges, similar to a digital stock market. They can also be held in a digital “wallet”, which is like a bank account for coins. For more on that topic, it would make the most sense to do extensive research to learn more.
The “currency” aspect of this digital property can also be a deceiving term, as not all coins can be used to buy and sell things. The most common and well-known cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, which a U.S. investor would value in U.S. dollars (USD), and it can be used to actually buy things. The coin can be purchased using USD and cashed back out into USD as well. Ethereum is another coin that can be used as a currency. However, some coins cannot be used to buy things – like “meme coins”, for example – but they can still be swapped out into other coins, like Ethereum, which can be converted to a currency like USD. How’s that for mass confusion? Oh, and the people who create a coin are referred to as a development team, or dev team.
So, back to the original question. What the hell is $MRI, and why do UFC fighters keep talking about it? For that, we turn to a rather large supporter of $MRI – a gentleman who goes by the name B-Roots.
“So what happens is, within the crypto space, coins get launched every single day,” B-Roots told Combat Press. “So you’re probably seeing hundreds of coins that get launched, every single day. The first day I saw Marshall Rogan Inu when it popped up. I saw Marshall Rogan Inu, and I was like, ‘I wonder what this is?’ This was all when Joe Rogan had to deal with getting kicked off of Spotify, and not being able to do the UFC event. It was [UFC] 271. So, you know, I looked at the website, and I said this thing can do really, really, really good, because this stands out. It really stands out, and, not to mention, I’ve got an interest in, you know, fighting sports.
“So what happened was, I looked into it, I checked the code and everything, and I go into Telegram, check with the devs, and find out that, you know, this is actually a legit thing. I mean, they really want to do well for the fighters who are in the cage. And I was like, ‘okay, this looks like it’s a good deal.’ We can make a bunch of money on it, and hope, you know, when you invest in it, you don’t lose your money, because there is some risk involved with that.
“But, over time, it became like big growth. They were doing everything that they could to make it go up. Before you know it, we’re holding Spaces calls with UFC fighters. They’re giving money to them, they’re shouting us out at UFC events. At [UFC] 272, they were giving call-outs. At 271, we got a bunch of call-outs. It was actually working and spreading very fast. And, before you know it, we’re like one of the biggest mainstream cryptocurrencies in all of crypto right now.
The name Marshall Rogan is a reference to comedian, podcaster and UFC commentator Joe Rogan’s dog. And, for more on the Joe Rogan controversy that B-Roots referred to, again, feel free to do your own research.
Now, not all meme coins, such as $MRI, actually serve a purpose. Most are just digital properties that someone is investing in.
“The best way to explain a meme coin is what everyone knows – Dogecoin,” said B-Roots. “When everyone hears, ‘a meme coin,’ the first thing they’re going to think of is Dogecoin, because of Elon Musk. What is Dogecoin? Dogecoin is a copy of Litecoin, and Litecoin is a copy of Bitcoin. So, they took their technology and created a coin. They put a dog on top of the logo. That’s it. That’s all it got. There’s nothing to it. You’re investing in a logo.
“It was originally a joke. It literally was built to be a joke, and a bunch of people started buying it up and started accruing value. And it’s one of the biggest coins there are. I mean, it’s a top-20 coin in all of the world, as far as cryptocurrencies go. So, Elon Musk gets on board. He likes to joke around about shit, and, you know, just troll everything. He helped grow Dogecoin by tweeting about it, and everyone started buying Dogecoin. But, it still has no purpose.
“So, the difference between Dogecoin and $MRI is that $MRI actually has a purpose. It’s fighting for fighters. It’s helping people out in real life. So that’s why I believe it’s a community coin, rather than a meme coin. It’s taking the UFC, which is its own community – it’s a small but growing one, since it’s one of the fastest growing sports in the world – and that is a community in itself. And then, you have the cryptocurrency community – and this $MRI token – who invests in meme coins and community coins and things like that, and then you’re actually combining them. Because, now you’re getting two different communities, and you’re combining them. But the craziest thing about all of it all is, in cryptocurrency, there’s been no coins that have been able to help out people from and outside of the crypto world. It’s always been like, within crypto, this small little group of people that we actually, you know, affiliate with ourselves all the time. So we’re actually bringing the outside world into crypto, and it’s just taken on a life of its own.”
So, what is the actual “purpose” of $MRI, you may ask? The answer is simple.
“Marshall Rogan Inu is a coin that’s fighting for fighters,” B-Roots explains. “And, it’s not just the UFC. They’re incorporating boxing now. What it does is – when you buy the coins, you have to pay a ‘tax’ [to the dev team]. So, say if, for example, I buy one thousand dollars worth of $MRI tokens, and 10 percent of that’s gonna get ‘taxed’, and that goes into a marketing wallet, which is used to fund the fighters. Whether it’s for surgery, whether it’s for injury, or whether it’s for someone like Cain Velasquez, families who just need help. They just donated 25,000 dollars of the purse to Cain Velasquez’s family.
“It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s fighting for fighters, helping them out, and helping them achieve their goals. Everyone that is willing to invest in this coin is agreeing to the tax, so they’re willing to do that. So whether you’re trading, buying them back and forth, buying, selling, buying, selling, you’re paying a tax, and it goes into the marketing wallet. This marketing wallet is in the millions of dollars right now. And, that allows them to consistently support fighters around the globe, and it’s working. Everything’s on [block]chain, so you can view everything that’s happening. It’s all public information, and everyone who has invested in it agrees to what they’re doing.”
Some coins, like $MRI, can only be bought in Ethereum. So to purchase the coin, someone would first need to acquire Ethereum on an exchange, then transfer it into a wallet. From there, they would connect the wallet to another exchange, where people can buy a coin like $MRI. And, as can be expected, there are typically additional fees involved with all of these transactions.
“So, there’s a decentralized exchange called Uniswap,” said B-Roots. “That’s where it all started. That was the only place you can get it. And now they’re on five or six exchanges – six different decentralized exchanges – where people can buy $MRI tokens. Also, it’s growing to the point where centralized exchanges are recognizing that, ‘Hey, this is actually not a scam.’ They’re not gonna take it on and deal with that. It’s just getting bigger and bigger. So, right now, with how I trade personally, I just basically do it with the decentralized exchanges, until I go with Coinbase, you know, to cash out my money and swap it back into Ethereum. But you can buy it anywhere from Uniswap to six different exchanges around the globe.”
B-Roots is not part of the dev team, but is a cryptocurrency investor. This was not his full-time career aspiration, but he has since quit his job to focus on investing full-time. His Twitter handle is @iambroots. His role in $MRI is simple.
“I’m not a marketing guy, but what I do is talk about the coins that I am in and what I really, truly like,” explained the investor. “$MRI is probably one of my top three investments, as far as growth in cryptocurrency. And, it’s a community coin, so the majority of the community does the reaching out. So, a lot of the community was doing the reaching out to the fighters, and emailing the fighters, and saying, ‘Hey, you know, we can get this money to you,’ and then you speak with the dev team who developed the coin. Then, they find out if it’s a real person, you know, that’s really the fighter. They verify all that information, and then they send them the money. So what I like to present as, to outside people who don’t know if it’s a cryptocurrency, is that it’s a meme coin.
“And, I have always said that this is actually a community coin, because the community does a lot of helping out to get to have this whole mission grow. Because, we truly believe the mission. We feel that they’re undervalued in their pay, and that they should be paid more, and we’re willing to take a cut of our cryptocurrency for that to happen. At the same time, the coin grew. The more people that got it, the more the coin actually grew too. So when I look at it from that perspective, I like to see people get helped out, so I do as much as I can on my page to to spread the word. So you’ll see. I went to [UFC] 272 wearing my $MRI shirt to spread the word. I handed out flyers. I’m gonna do the same thing at 273. I try to get as many fighters to get interviews and just to spread the word because the bigger this thing gets, the more everybody wins, in my opinion.”
$MRI has morphed into something more than a basic property investment, as it allows supporters to funnel money indirectly to professional fighters. However, it is still an investment, and there are inherent risks involved. For now, however, according to B-Roots, the dev team has seemingly done what they have said they will do.
“I have yet to see them turn down the fighter,” said B-Roots. “If the fighter agrees to it, and wants it, they get it. Like, if they’re fine with taking the money and getting support, they get it. We just reach out to as many people as we can. The dev team decides whether or not the fighter gets the money, but we’re doing the actual work. Like I’ve been trying to get after some people. There’s people, who I know personally, and they’re like, ‘Hey, yeah, I know this guy.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, sweet. Just give me their information, and I’ll get it to the team, and then they’ll get hooked up.’ So what I’ll end up doing is, I’ll take their information and give it to the team. They text message the fighter, the fighter verifies it via either a tweet, or at the actual UFC event, that they are supported by Marshal Rogan Inu, and then that’s all good.”
So, the dev team is who makes the decision on whether or not a fighter gets paid in Ethereum from the marketing wallet, and they have control over that wallet. What is keeping them from taking the money that was put into the $MRI marketing wallet for themselves?
“They are anonymous,” said B-Roots. “However, they are KYC’d [which refers to a regulatory rule referred to as Know Your Client]. So what happens with KYC, let’s say the devs were like, ‘Alright, we’re leaving with the 3.5 billion. It’s ours.’ What the community would do is go to the KYC, and they would verify that they just left and just bounced and took the money, and they would have their personal information. They’d let that out, and there would probably be a pretty big run-down.”
Well, that is one risk, and while it seems that’s not their intention, anything is possible. There is also the basic investing risk of buying something that loses value and never recovers.
“There is a trading side to it, also,” B-Roots elaborated. “So, it is just like regular cryptocurrency. It has just as much risk as any other cryptocurrency, because people can buy and sell at their will. So, there’s nothing holding anyone back from saying ‘Hey. So many people bought it up to one dollar, and I’ve been in since one cent. I [multiplied] my money [by 100 times], so I’m out. I’m selling.’ And if there’s more sellers than buyers, then the game’s over. However, this is the difference – there are over 9,000 holders, and almost 7,000 people have not sold a single token, which is unbelievable.
“Like, you don’t hear that in crypto. Like, you just do not see that in crypto where the majority of people are just holding it, and they’re just enjoying the community. Like, they’re on Telegram, and I’ll wake up one night – you know, after going a day without going into Telegram – and it tells you how many messages missed since I last went in, and it’ll be in the tens of thousands. People were just talking cryptocurrency, and people were talking UFC when the fights are on. There’s just like a constant stream of just talk going on within the community. That shows why it’s such a strong community, because a majority of people are not selling the token. They believe in the mission, so they’re not selling. There’s a small percentage of people selling, and those people are selling – going back and forth for the coin and trading it – which is actually generating more fees for the fighters. So, it’s actually to the benefit of people selling online, because it’s just more money.”
So, with one billion tokens initially created, outside of what will never be available in what’s called the “burn wallet”, what else could cause $MRI to crash, and lose all of its value? For example, what happens if it all gets bought up, and trading comes to a halt? What does that mean for the fighters it is supporting?
“That would never happen, in my opinion,” said B-Roots. “We’ve never seen it. We never saw it with Bitcoin – in its 10-plus years of existence – that it has the ability to be all bought up. With the exchanges, there’s always going to be money there, because, as the price goes up, there are people who want to take a profit. Everybody has a price. Like, I have a price. I’ve got a good amount of tokens, but there’s a price that I’m willing to sell it for. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m out of the community. You don’t have to have the coins to be part of the community. I can still do what I do and support the cause and everything.
“But, everyone has a price, and over time, as that price goes up, you know, there’s going to be selling. And, when there’s selling, there’s taxes, and when there’s buying, there’s taxes. So, even if, for a certain amount of time, the price crashes, because it goes to a point where it’s so high, the price actually comes down, there’s going to be buyers that are going to come in and say, ‘I want it at that price.’ Every single time it crashes, or it goes down in value, that’s more taxes. When people buy it all up, that’s more taxes. So I don’t see this ever going away, unless the dev team were to say they are out of here. But, I don’t see that happening, because, when you hear them talk, they genuinely believe in what they are doing.”
Another potential risk to $MRI could be people creating new coins that try and piggyback off the same concept. So, what happens if another dev team creates a new coin that only takes a five-percent “tax” instead of ten percent, and still creates a wallet for fighters?
“They have,” B-Roots stated. “They have, and they failed. They all failed. The way this was marketed from the beginning was really genius, and the thing is, the fighters are going to expect it to be a scam. In the beginning, I thought it was just a scam. You just don’t know. So you start getting more like, ‘Okay, like this is legit.’ Just like the fighters.
“They hear it and they are like, ‘It’s just a scam.’ But then they hear another fighter say, ‘They actually paid me ten thousand dollars in Ethereum. Then, they start believing and realizing this thing is not a scam, and that this is a movement. It’s making change. But, when the copycats come out, they’re just copycats. So, are their intentions well in the beginning? Probably not, because if your intentions were well, you could have just joined the $MRI team. What I like to call that is a money grab, because your intention is just to copy off of what they’re doing. If you really cared about the cause, you would have just joined the cause.”
Because the $MRI marketing wallet is held in Ethereum, the fighters receive their donations in the same cryptocurrency. Since most need to convert it to USD to actually use it for their various needs, The $MRI community actually helps them learn how to use the various wallets and exchanges. While there could be some exchange risk, moving things around while the prices of Ethereum are moving up and down, B-Roots said that this particular cryptocurrency does not swing as hard up and down as others do. So, if the fighter needs the money, he or she will just need to get it exchanged to USD right away. This creates an educational experience that they can also use outside of just receiving donations.
“So what’s happening also, with this, it‘s actually teaching them cryptocurrency in a very fast-growing industry,” B-Roots explained. “A lot of these fighters don’t even know how to create a wallet. They don’t know how they even get it started. So what they’ll do is, the community has a team of people that actually goes on the phone with the fighters and teaches them how to create a wallet.
“What we’re trying to get them to do is actually get them into $MRI also, so that they can enjoy the run-up, because we feel that this is going to be a successful coin in the future. I mean, it’s only two months old, and it’s already like thousands of [times larger]. It would be awesome if we gave them some Ethereum that they can cash out, but also have an investing side, and have a stake into this $MRI token, that we feel will appreciate through the years. I’d like to see that. Of course, that could create some selling pressure on the coin. It’s possible, but if you need the money, you need the money.”
Marshall Rogan Inu, which has since been rebranded as just “Marshall Inu”, is an interesting concept, and time will tell if it will continue to really provide a way for fighters to secure much-needed funds. For some, it’s for training. For others, it can bridge a gap after an injury. For some, it might even help with legal funds. Whatever the need may be, thus far, there have been some well-known fighters giving them credit, and the word is out.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Combat Press, LLC – including any individual associated with the company – is not a licensed investment company, and does not make any investment recommendations, including with cryptocurrencies. We do not recommend buying or selling any securities or investments of any form. This article is simply for informational purposes only, and should not be used to make any investment decisions. Anyone considering investing in anything should consult a licensed professional.