The narrative is one of the biggest problems you see in crypto; you see it on Telegram, Twitter, Discord, YouTube. First, it’s a shill pump, then dump.
A new project emerges — the people printing the token line up some Twitter and YouTube “influencers” all to drive the token price up, a ton of people ape in chasing the proverbial moonshot thinking it’s the next ship in a week or less, the core team dumps, influencers dump, apes get rekt.
The more we as a community support these types of projects, the more of them we’ll see and the more scrutiny the industry will see as a whole. Is this what we want? Or should we instead foster a narrative around how the industry is helping people better manage their money earn higher returns than in TradFi by lowering overhead and creating an ownable, shareable, distributed, trustless ecosystem?
But while some groups and projects strive towards these goals, the scrutiny from the *-Inu Coin projects adversely affects the sector as a whole.
Most “Gems” are Ponzi gamed pumpdumpers and will see you rekt.
Let me be clear — most “Gems” are Ponzi gamed pumpdumpers and will see you rekt, one-sided yield farms are Ponzi games of chicken that will see you rekt. Do yourself a favor, and don’t buy into the hype of riches. The result will be “Apes together rekt.” You’re also exposing yourself to rug pull risk by participating in these scams.
Community enforced safety
This has led to the community creating a trust score of sorts based on each “project’s” underlying mechanics and choices; one of the most prominent of these is a service called RugDoc.io.
You submit your project to RugDoc, and they score its safety based on factors such as locked liquidity, contract upgradeability, mitigators for hard rugs, etc…
Now, this had to happen for a couple of reasons.
- Scams are everywhere.
- These “projects” are typically clones (forks) of some other project and provide zero innovation.
- These “projects” are usually Ponzi games.
This has ultimately led to an ecosystem that inherently creates barriers to innovation, a new project launches. Still, unless it meets the above criteria, it is deemed a dangerous and high-risk asset; the community then doesn’t participate in the project because of the high-risk warning label that is put on the project — since it’s being judged against the endless basis cash and ohm clones that pop up and drop off the market every day.
In a trustless system, trust is everything.
To prove this, we intentionally fell on the sword. So here is our project, Ballast, a thorough Whitepaper, a doxxed team (where we can afford to be), even a webinar this coming Monday sponsored by our friends over at Seven Train Ventures — and we have been deemed a high-risk project.
Problematic, perhaps, but only through the lens of the broader ecosystem. Despite the trustless nature of Crypto, trust is still one of the primary drivers of project success. Projects live and die by the communities’ confidence in the project — and despite the mantra of code is law, trust is what primarily drives participation.
If there is no trust in the developers, the team, the vision — participants leave to/and chase the next pump — and unsurprisingly, the same pattern exists in most “shilled gems.”
Change the narrative
So, where the hell am I going with all this. As a community and ecosystem, we need to change the narrative and set parameters around trust differently.
If we don’t want draconian regulatory oversight, we need to remove bad actors by not participating in their projects. The only ones who win in those projects are the people who start them, and any capital you may get from the next shitcoin likely comes at the expense of some other person just trying to make a buck, at the end it’s a zero sum game. The more you play in these Ponzi games, the more of them there will be, and the less legitimate this space will be seen. We need to stop feeding the dragon.
Basically, if you give a shit about this space, if you care about DeFi, stop putting your capital into worthless projects, #dumpthepump.
I’m all for dumb shit; I think Doge is hilarious, worthless, but hilarious, but let’s start looking at a projects. Do they provide real value to a user group, is there a mission behind it, who are the people that are involved, who are the people that the team is bringing in?
Do your own research (DYOR), of course, but to DYOR you have to understand the right motivators and signals from projects — and keep your eye on your number, a figure you’re working towards, could be $10k, could be $10MM.
You want a Lambo, its 300k, how do you get from 1 > 300k and work backwards from that (btw if you went from 1>300k, a Lambo is literally the worst investment choice you can make). Most newCoins will lose you money as you go chasing pumps.
There’s a method to all this, and the goal of the BLST.Community is to enable people to think intelligently so they come out on top, remember #dumpthepump.