Original author: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
A LIBRA meme coin takeover game caused an uproar in the cryptocurrency circle. On February 15, the Argentine president announced the launch of the meme coin LIBRA and announced the contract address. It then soared all the way, with a market value of more than 4 billion US dollars. Then within a few hours, its price soon ushered in a sharp drop. The current price is 0.36 US dollars, and the market value is less than 400 million US dollars. The Argentine president deleted the previous promotion of the meme coin just a few hours after posting the tweet, and said, I thought it was just casually supporting a private entrepreneurial project that had nothing to do with me, just like before. I don’t know the details of the project, and I will definitely not spread it after understanding it (this is also the reason for deleting the tweet).
Investors who participated in the charge of Tugou at the first time suffered heavy losses. Solayer developers Chaofan Shou and Tonykebot lost more than $2 million in this practice, and announced that the team behind their LIBRA was a list of core members of KIP Protocol, vowing to pursue accountability to the end. There are far more people who have suffered losses than these two. According to lmk.fun monitoring, based on transaction records, a total of 24 traders lost more than $1 million on LIBRA, and 61 traders lost more than $500,000. The biggest loser realized a loss of $5.17 million. He spent a total of $5.6 million to buy 2.1 million tokens, and finally sold them for only $430,000. Correspondingly, as of February 15, 8 wallets related to the LIBRA team obtained 57.6 million USDC and 249,671 SOL (about $49.7 million) by adding liquidity, removing liquidity and claiming fees, and cashing out a total of about $107 million.
Insider trading of meme coins, celebrity influence promotion, and games of taking over faster than you can run have once again become the focus of market attention.
Today, Paridigm researcher Samczsun, Solana co-founder Toly and crypto KOL Coobie discussed their views in a Twitter interaction.
Cabal and KOL
Samczsun first raised the question: From a social perspective, will this incident make some of the people involved take responsibility?
Tolys answer to this question seems pessimistic, because group trials at the social layer are themselves a problem because they are a passive response to results rather than based on a set of pre-set and recognized rules. The attacker can generate failed tokens infinitely, become the only bidder, obtain most of the supply, and then transfer the contract address to the KOL. In Tolys view, the only way is to force users to have a social credit score and reject tokens with lower scores.
Samczsun went on to ask, if memecoins controlled by insiders are bad, then why not formally exclude all participants to begin with? That way, in the short term, the benefits of a one-time profit would not be enough to make up for the cost of being excluded, and in the long term, such behavior would not be profitable at all.
Tolys answer is simple and direct. After the KOL promotes the contract address, he will be excluded by the fan base, and then the conspiracy group will turn to the next KOL.
Cobie said that many KOLs don’t even know who they are dealing with or what they are posting. There is just an agent who tells these KOLs that if you tweet about it, you will get X coins.
If KOLs and their agents are informed of something obviously bad, will KOLs be held accountable for their actions? Perhaps we often see that some tokens have been proven to have multiple insider transactions and frauds, but no one has been punished in any way.
The reputation of some KOLs has indeed been affected, and part of the reason is: How do you define good and bad in memecoin? Even if it is a completely unintentional free market token distribution, the top 20% of holders will eventually own more than 80% of the tokens. Toly gave his own answer.
At this point, Cobie bluntly explained that there is currently no effective way to humiliate those shameless people. He then sent a long tweet comment to explain his views.
“This has been going on since before memecoins and basically since I’ve been in crypto. (These recent operations are just more efficient and obvious.) Every time someone is shamed, they use it as a populist rhetoric, and some even become more popular because of it. The accused just accuse others in turn, creating a counter-attack. For example, some YouTubers have been promoting scams for three cycles in a row, and they are still popular despite constant exposure. The cyclical nature of the crypto industry means that there will always be new entrants to fill the gap of old users, so these people will always find new audiences.
The market lacks truth and supervision, and the results are often inconclusive.
In Cobies opinion, the only people who have been humiliated to the point of leaving the industry are either relatively reputable people who have made mistakes or people who dont need to rely on the industry to make money. Those who really should be expelled already know what they are doing and have made their choice. Exposing them does not make them feel ashamed, but it threatens their income, so they will fight back. In the absence of an arbitrator of truth, the debate often has no final conclusion.
Furthermore, Cobie said that it may take more than five years for people’s true nature to be understood by the public, and that’s only if they make obvious mistakes along the way.”
“If cheaters are not threatened with loss of their freedom, it is almost impossible to prevent them from continuing to commit fraud.”
The takeover game is in an unsolvable dilemma
Cobie also made a pointed comment on the controversial high-valuation VC coins and the fast-paced problem in meme coins. He said that the current market development is that market participants are actively rushing into these scams like moths. Most people know that these are scams, but their goal is to sell them to the receivers at 3 times the price. They just want to get rich in 2 weeks, not 2-4 years. Players hope that they can also win the big prize in the next action.
If there is no way to stop them, then perhaps avoiding involvement as much as possible is an option.
Cobie said that investor/player behavior is very easy to change. If you lose 10 times, you will stop playing the game. No one is buying VC coins anymore, in fact some of them (very, very few) are mispriced. They are not buying these coins anymore because they are tired of being sucked dry.
Cobie has previously written about VC coins with high FDV and low circulation, but he was disappointed that it did not achieve the desired goal and did not stop the public from buying these tokens. The only way to change investor behavior is if the participants lose enough money. Only after experiencing the pain can this group of people really realize that they should avoid participating in it.
“This in turn changes the behavior of token issuers, and the public will no longer buy these products, so you can no longer issue these types of tokens easily,” Cobie wrote.
at last
If you now start a token echo, and have to choose between two paths:
(1) Sell 25% to venture capital firms and insiders, keep 35% for the team, and launch a token that receives proceeds from Echos business and distributes them to holders, with a low circulation;
(2) Sell 0% to anyone, keep 50% for myself, launch a memecoin called Echo the Racist Dolphin that has no connection to Echo other than the name, deploy it from my public wallet, and post tweets from the CA account;
Which one do you think will have a higher market value? Cobie gave his answer: The value of meme coins (at least for now) will be higher than that of VC coins. However, if the same experiment is done again in 5 years, the result will be exactly the opposite.
Interestingly, in the Cobie comment section, a curious person posted a picture asking which token he mentioned.
Cobie said that the contract address would be released in 25 minutes, and Toly commented: Do you have any shame?
Cobie responded that it was just a joke and teased Toly using Buterin’s nickname (V God’s name).
