This is the explanation most of the shitcoin crypto space, in fact the whole blockchain space, dirty influencers, private investors and project developers were afraid would surface someday.
Before I get started, I would like to take you on a dive into the miraculous world of smoke and mirrors of project launches, putting the light on and offering an honest view on what is actually happening behind the decor.
The shitcoin space is filled with a few types of participants that are all looking to profit from the new launches of various “projects” nicely packaged and enrichment promising for all of the people that would put money on them.
The project creator.
Most of the people involved in bringing new projects to the public have no real-world changing idea that would make everyone’s life better. Instead, they want to make some money out of this overhyped, overpromising, and unregulated El Dorado, where everyone is invited to pour their funds in a game of musical chairs. This is why you will see new projects emerge like mushrooms, none of them making life better for all of their participants. Instead, they all are a Ponzi scheme, without any real product or purpose, other than making some people rich at the expense of the late buyers. Usually, the ones that create the shitcoin ape projects, are either rug pulling directly, buy running away with the proceeds of the sale and removing liquidity, or are flooding the market with tokens given to affiliates, that would then in turn bring in more buyers at the table. There is this underground world, where project creators are a part of vast networks of “private investors”, “influencers”, “marketeers” and shillers, where they market their project beforehand, trying to get some initial funding in order to make it happen. The way things work with most of the projects, is that the creators are the ones to cash out first, giving tokens in exchange for the real crypto currencies, like ETH or BNB or stablecoins. These tokens get bought by the next tier of this pyramid scheme, the VCs or the “private investors”.
The private investors
They are always the first to catch wind and invest into the emerging projects. They are searched by the project creators, promised large quantities of tokens on huge discounts, often offered with no contract, no lockup, no vesting, free to roll and be dumped on the retail buyers participating in the public exchange transactions. The private investors often have hired people, acting as agents or hunters for emerging projects. They are always the first to profit from any token sale, as they are always the ones selling constant amounts of tokens at any price, as no matter how low the price might go, they are still in profit. Some of the private investors are sometimes gathering in what they call VCs, trying to resemble the classic financial markets, but most of them are actually ordinary Joes, riding the crypto rollercoaster with little to no actual financial or economic knowledge, no academic degree or anything else than the wish for becoming rich by any means necessary. This is why, because all they know is that they want to make money on the backs of the retail buyers, they need the influencers, or the marketeers.
The dirty marketeers
Any project creator and any private investor knows that in order to make money from the projects they are pushing forward, they need the crowds to gather to their booth, drawn in by the promise of becoming rich by “investing”. Actually, the real investment has ended long before any project has hit the market, and now the dirty marketeers and influencers are coming into play. And don’t think that all of the influencers out there are dirty. There are a few that actually really care about the space and strive to educate people to open up their eyes and don’t fall for scam projects, even though sometimes even the best of the honest members of the crypto space get scammed by dishonest project creators that rug without remorse. Happened to me a few times already, so trust me when I say this, there is no way to convince anyone outside that you really didn’t know they were dishonest, no matter how hard you did your research. But to return to the bad actors, a dirty marketeer’s role is to make the project known to the public and to lure in naive individuals fooled by the promise of getting rich quick, by entering various shitcoin projects that are made to look like they will revolutionize the way hot water is made. Actually, these influencers and the marketeers are exposing their followers to various projects that pay for being advertised as the next financial independence solution. They are building communities of dedicated followers that are following blindly their financial investment advice, always accompanied by the well-known disclaimer “This is not a financial advice”. What really happens is that this is a reverse psychology instrument, where, the followers, because of the trust they invest in the influencers, stop doing their own research, and instead ape in whatever “this is not an investment advice” offered by their demigod, chad, bad successful boy of an influencer. They have networks of shillers, paid individuals that are posing as community members, that have the sole responsibility to agree with the proposed investment advice, show their excitement and expectation for the upcoming project or expressing their FOMO. Often, they use just simple armies of bots are posting the same message in a great number of Gem rooms, for the normal public to see and follow. Looking at the crypto scene, you’ll see that many are picturing themselves as ferocious and lethal animals, like wolves, lions, sharks, cobras etc. Actually, the prey of these dangerous animals are their very communities of domestic apes, ready to pour in their monthly paychecks, into whatever new project is advertised.
The retail buyers
This is the last tier of the pyramid. The base of the whole house of cards. The retail investors have no access to the deals behind closed doors. They do not understand the tech. They have no way of differentiating between a shitcoin or a legit coin because they barely understand technology in general. They are the consumers, that take things for granted, because someone that poses as a successful person, one they are aspiring to and would like to become like one day, said that is worth spending their money on. These are the contributors to the financial independence of the private investors and the project creators. Without the retail buyers the upper tiers of the pyramid would crumble and fall, because they would have no inflow to keep them alive. They would have to return to their ordinary lives of McDonalds cashiers, or delivery boys. They are called apes and portrayed as such, not because of their outstanding wits, but because of the mimicry that characterizes the animal reign they are a part of. So, it’s easy for anyone that controls these apes to instrument them to go out and buy any shitcoin is advertised, irrespective of the value the said shitcoin would offer to their owner. The only reason people are buying shitcoins is because they want to get rich. Not because of the tech, not because of the revolutionizing of the industry, not because they would end poverty and hunger in Africa. Actually, for the apes themselves, 99% of the time, buying the advertised shitcoins ends in loss of funds. But because their personal investment is small, they consider it as an acceptable loss and bring in some more money on the table for the next overhyped project put in front of them by their fearsome animal demigods.
Now to analyze what has been happening with WSB and their revolutionary project, and how a few interested parties are hoping to keep the money-making machine alive by throwing me to the public to be devoured, so that they can feed off it in silence.
First of all, apart from the name, there is little connection between the Reddit WallStreetBets group and the telegram WallStreetBets group. They have a leading influencer, Jaime Rogozinski, who actually created the initial WSB subreddit, but which has stated publicly he has little to no understanding of how the blockchain tech really works. He, as it happens with all the shitcoin projects, was approached by a team that has no connection to the WSB and which is only capitalizing on the name WSB has built for itself with the recent GME event. There were a number of threads started by the real WSB people on Reddit, among which, the most eloquent is this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/mub6t7/scam_alert_wallstreetbets_telegram_crypto/
These guys, published a Litepaper, that apart from mental conditioning for the retail buyers, notice the apes, has nothing of real value in it. It features the well-known reverse psichology “This is not an investment advice” disclaimer and pushes forward a deceiving tokenomics chart with no figures, just percents of a mysterious total raise, one that claims that the private sale funds are vested. Well, guess what, they weren’t, and I’ll explain in a bit why is that.
They have approached me to get ChainRidge Capital into a private investment and both ChainRidge Capital and myself got to invest in them beforehand, money upfront, claim tokens later, with no actual contract of any form being signed. We received no SAFT, we signed no SAFT, we had no binding clauses or anything of that sort. All we had, was the promise that when the time comes, we will be offered a link on a newly emerged launchpad called BSC Starter, through which we will claim our funds.There was no mention at any times of tokens being locked or vested.
As I said, I was offered to also invest on my own, besides my share I had in ChainRidge. Actually, because I proposed to them to also accept ChainRidge, it was that the VC even had a share in this investment. We all deposited our private investment with them and patiently awaited the moment it will be open for trading so we do what all the private investors are doing, selling our early acquired tokens to the retail buyers.
When the BSC Starter claim page was released to us, I was in an area with poor internet connection, so it was slow and sloppy for me to claim my funds. More than that, the BSC Starter was returning an annoying error, which made me think I need to use more gas for the claim transaction to go through, a thing that is clearly visible onchain.
Therefore, I kept trying to claim my tokens, as the website was constantly showing me an active claim button and the sum of one million tokens available to claim. At the same time, knowing that at the start of each launch there usually is a chase to be the first to dump your tokens, otherwise you wouldn’t recuperate your investment, I opened Pancake Swap, to be ready to sell the tokens after I received them.
It was very weird, because even though I saw that there were tokens available to sell on my Pancake connected wallet, at the same time, I had errors on the BSC Starter page and tokens available to claim. So, as I was trying to sell and got errors on Pancake too, I kept trying to claim the tokens I saw available on the BSC Starter page, each time increasing the gas price.
I was very nervous and anxious because of the row of errors I was encountering, and fearing that others will dump faster than me, I kept trying to sell big chunks of tokens. At some point, the BSC Starter page stopped responding altogether. Then I tried removing some of my BNB balance as I didn’t believe the numbers I saw on the screen. There was no way of having so much BNB, so I tried transferring them to Binance. After that, I tried to continue to understand what was happening and kept trying Pancake.
Shortly I had no WSB tokens in my address as well, as in the multitude of the sell operations I kept trying, everything I claimed went through. Everything happened extremely fast, time flew instantly, and also at some point my internet connection went down completely, not being able to actually see what happened. Hours later it came back up for a little while, and I saw that I had the same amount of BNB I tried to remove to Binance earlier, so thinking it was another error, I tried removing them to Binance again, as the numbers on the screen made no sense to me.
With the connection down again, I left the in the middle of nowhere place where I was staying, for the nearest city at a friend’s place, a few hours’ drive, where I could find a reliable connection where I could finally see that I had a lot of BNB in my account. At the same time, my Telegram inbox was flooded with death threats, because of an article published hastily by BSC Starter where they were accusing me of theft.
I decided to take a break from it all and let things to cool down a bit before I could explain what went on. I am extremely annoyed by the decision of the launchpad that was meant to secure the token release event to blame on me their failure to provide a reliable platform, where the funds would be transferred safely between parties. I have not interfered with the way the website was built at no point in time, especially given the fact that I am not a dev and I don’t know how to code at all.
All I did was to use the functions of the website, as it was provided by the BSC Starter team. I was under no contract that would enforce any clause, other that the contract represented by the code on the website I was provided with to claim my tokens. It is extremely displeasing to find out that instead of taking full responsibility for their incompetence they chose to falsely accuse me of theft, and not try to have the patience and courtesy to first get in touch with me and only after to issue a press release stating the facts that the launchpad provider failed to properly execute the task of handling the token distribution and that they are working to resolve this unpleasant incident. I even have a screen shot as proof, that even today, after all is ended, I still have the option to claim some 750k tokens.
The past day I wanted to get to an agreement with these guys, as I hate being labeled as a thief, therefore I extended the wish to reach an agreement and get my name cleared, all under the condition of them admitting they made a clumsy website and that it was no hack, exploit or whatever from my side, but just an error that slipped in the website design from their side, because of which I kept receiving tokens after I claimed and received errors. Instead of reaching a mutually satisfying agreement, I was met with a slur of threats and invectives from the representatives of both WSB wannabees and BSC Starter.
As can everyone see from this exchange of messages, the WSB/BSC rep went back and forth, accepting, then disagreeing with my request to assume full responsibility for what happened, even though they at some point fully admitted it was their wrongdoing, as they “wrote that code with no checks for claims, because we approved only trusted people in that group. You were not the only one aware you could claim more than once”. Actually, I honestly did not think for one second that it was possible to claim more than once. Because of the errors I kept receiving, I thought the site did not work and I had no real way to claim my tokens.
I am a person that doesn’t take personal threats lightly, and I will not accept to be the one to be accused for other people’s incompetence, especially given the fact that this was conceived as a pyramid scheme where they wanted to take advantage of the retail buyers, so to save face they push me in front of the public, where in fact everyone involved in this project is doing just the same thing, taking the money from the apes. If the WSB copycat (as a short research would show you that there is only a tangential affiliation with the Reddit WSB, and they are using WSB as a franchise to appeal more to the public) and the BSC Starter incompetent team decide to assume no responsibility whatsoever for this event, I will do the most sensible thing here and will offer the raised BNB for charity.
This is all a matter of saving face and trying to keep profiting from the WSB crypto franchise for some people, a scheme that they hope it will keep running if they feed me to the angry public, charging me with baseless accusations, and then they could go back to pumping the token using the classic ways, attracting even more unsuspecting members of the public into buying the top prices of this token. Some are saying that this pump and dump scheme will raise to as much as 10$, but don’t be fooled, in this game of musical chairs, the late buyers are the ones that have most to suffer, while the initiators of the project stand to profit the most, as obviously, there are no lockups or vested tokens, everything is free to dump on the retail buyers.
The bottom line is this. A project that was designed as yet another pump and dump, using the well-known brand of WSB as a franchise, that hired and offered a percent of the proceeds to a newly emerged launchpad, BSC Starter, and attracted private investors with unlocked funds that were falsely advertised as locked and vested and no contracts governing the private sale of the tokens, has fucked up their launch due to the incompetence of their own team. Instead of assuming the blame and try to repair the damage they made possible, they chose to shift the attention to my person, falsely accusing me of stealing the funds, whereas I just used the claim platform they provided without tampering with it or its code in any way or form. I am not running away and even more than that, I will offer the received BNB proceeds for charity, helping real people that are in need, rather than some entities that are profiting always on the backs on the retail sellers. I have not stolen any tokens, not from my fellow ChainRidge Capital partners, not from fellow marketeers and influencers, not from the public. I just did what everyone else participating in these token sales is doing, albeit in an unfortunate series of events: I received funds from the provided website and sold them to the free market.
I will not be going away, actually, I am decided to change the way the blockchain is perceived and start a free educational series, available for all, no strings attached, where the main purpose is to transform the apes into homo sapiens, to help them get educated to think for themselves, analyze the projects in the blockchain industry and make a difference between money grabs like WSB Token and legit projects. Also, I am effective immediately renouncing my marketeer role and will not continue to do paid work for the first shitcoin that wants to have my voice supporting them, as I had a lot to lose from supporting projects that were just looking to grab some cash and not really develop the industry in some meaningful way. Instead, I will dedicate time for research and only share my findings in public.
