Rcently on Twitter, someone did a crypto giveaway of $200k, I think they were trying to promote a coin and then a lot of people benefited from the giveaway and were very happy that someone was considerate enough to do something like then.
Someone raised a conversation about a particular influencer who was known for shilling rugs and how he just keeps enriching himself with the losses of others and how he comes online to brag about the wealth he's made.
So apparently this guy became very rich via crypto, but he didn't just do so by being an investor, he prompted some scam coin and people lost a lot of money because of this, and someone talked about how he's selfish but someone entirely hasn't even benefitted anything from crypto Twitter but came up with a 200k giveaway for people in a bear market situation.
It was funny to me because crypto is now the wild West, everything is currently so unorganized, there are no real projects and the ones that were built in the past are either no longer functional or they're no longer relevant.
The money is no longer gone and people have abandoned ship.
The 2024/25 pump we saw was still not about building and all that, the market was not really favorable to builders, just a bunch of memes projects, projects aiming to extract and guys like the one that was paid to shill rug projects.
People like him got rich off of shilling meme coins, but I won't really blame him because people still don't understand how influencing works. Most influencers who are paid shills are just there for the money, and I don't still know why a person would be tempted to buy what an influencer is advertising especially when you know they're not after the financial interest of their followers.
However we've seen this countless times. In the past, Hive has also tried to pay influencers to shill the platform. I remember how we also tried to use the rally car to advertise Hive too, the problem is that most of the time, it doesn't work out well because the people who are doing this shilling do not originally care about the platform and I thought people already know this.
Except an influencer is home grown and emotionally attached to a project, there is no way they're going to be shilling stuff for the good of a project and the potential investors. The guy who was being called out for being selfish is also an influencer like this, however I think he was mostly called out more because he made a lot of money shilling projects that scammed his followers.
I remembered he hosted a space once and over 3k people joined hoping to learn how to make money when he was clearly selling fake shills and becoming rich off of insider's information, and there was practically nothing left to see, but this is the reality of crypto: the rich will smile, host spaces and ask the poor to buy into some useless coins, the poor looses more money, and the rich makes more money from shilling.
The communities we saw in 2017 and 2021 are no longer there.
Folks are no longer trying to build usable products, or create a community around one. The communities in crypto are currently fragmented, except in places like Hive where people still have a collective interest to move forward, of course there are still lots of BTC and ETH Maxis but the core of the crypto we currently see now are mostly individuals who are just there to shill stuffs.
Occasionally someone comes like the guy I first mentioned and do some giveaway, but that is just about that, and there's nothing left to see.
I'm not sure if it's going to get better. It felt like the golden age of crypto core culture is over and what we have now is a shadow of the past. I still cannot tell, we have to wait till late 2027 since that's when builders are likely to start building again.
