When data falsification and traffic bribery have become the basic operation of Shangsu, what is left in the industry?

Well, today the market is so bad. Looking at all the big gods analyzing data/market sentiment/community heat, as a person who has experienced 94,319, I also want to share a joke and industry thoughts that I have recently encountered at work (also a kind of reminiscence of the past).

PundiAI recently conducted a brand/mainnet upgrade + coin swap, so it has been in contact with exchanges. From building in 2017 to today, these standard processes are quite clear. Apart from corresponding compliance procedures and code audits, the rest mainly involves market budget, how many new users/traffic can be brought in, and how to enable existing users to benefit from dividends, etc. Projects require liquidity and new trading venues; exchanges require users and trading volume. Each party takes what they need, which is understandable.

The interesting thing is that after the simple business communication, it comes to the stage of being judged by the research department. They raised several points of veto against our previous submissions, or the need to increase the budget due to certain conditions not meeting the standards. I’ll pick out a few interesting ones to talk about,

The first is that our data and popularity are insufficient, specifically reflected in the lack of social media data and on-chain data, and then gave us several examples of projects in the same track. I was puzzled. You are all research departments, researching projects every day. Can’t you still see the authenticity and truth of the data? Come on, Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, but only a few thousand views and less than 10 comments under the tweets. Are you telling me this is real? And on-chain data, each transaction hash contains multiple transaction records. Are all the retail investors in your project experts? Everyone can set up their own RPC interface to process transactions? This is obviously unreasonable, right? Especially in professional AI data labeling, it is a threshold itself. It is unlikely that a large number of labelers will simultaneously annotate the same set of data. Especially the cost of subsequent data verification and cleaning is higher than the labeling itself, so it is even more unlikely, unless you simply don’t care about the cost or your purpose is not for the data itself.

The second is institutional endorsement. Most current projects (except for meme) now require the backing/support of major VCs. However, as an established project, from Function X in 19 to PundiAI today, it has been more than 6 years since its establishment, and we have always used our own money to build, never taking a penny from external sources. From the perspective of us ‘old folks,’ don’t you think this is a good thing? Purely community-driven, no VC control, and emotionally speaking, isn’t this a very ‘sentimental’ thing? However, in the eyes of the research department, this has become synonymous with lack of orthodox institutional endorsement, being illegitimate, and lacking popularity. I don’t know how to describe this situation…

The third is the circulation of tokens and the valuation. From 19 to now, all the coins have been unlocked, and our mc = fdv, with close to 70% of the tokens locked in the validator nodes. Then the big shots in the research department said, the selling pressure is huge, I was wondering, first of all, most of the coins are in the validator nodes, and we are purely community-based, who is going to sell? Secondly, our coin has been on major exchanges, after six years of ups and downs, if we were to sell, why would we go to you? Thirdly, the size of the selling pressure is directly proportional to the market fdv, our market value and fdv are less than 150m, a business with products, customers, and revenue, an AI data layer is only 150m, why don’t you go see those projects with an fdv of 1b that have just been listed, their selling pressure needs more attention, right? No, their later selling pressure needs more attention, right?!

There are many points to complain about, and I won’t go into them one by one. I can understand that research experts like you have to look at many projects every day, each with their own perspectives and data dimensions, involving a lot of professional knowledge. But at least, the basic authenticity and morality should be distinguished, right?

I don’t know when it started, traffic bribery, data bribery/falsification, project reskinning (I’ve even heard of founders changing coins?), airdrops to studios, etc., have actually become the basic operations for projects to list coins.

Sometimes I feel that listing coins, especially some early coins, is very similar to venture capital investment. It is the character of the people/teams that are being invested in. If the listings are all based on these means and operations to exchanges, to VCs, then the later development of these projects is really worrying.

We’ve been in this circle for so long, and we’ve heard a little about these tricks and means. It’s not that we can’t do it, but we don’t want to do it. Because in the end, these things will only benefit the studio, the gray industry, the banker, etc., at the cost of the money of new retail investors, the shift of the focus of the builder, and the decline of the entire industry. (To be frank, these airdrop tricks now are what we left over from the past ))

We have seen bull and bear markets, and storms, so we know that it is really not easy to stay true to our original aspiration. Sometimes we really miss the buddies we met during the 17/18 ICO (many bosses we knew back then have retired), even though the community at that time was poor, but every conversation was about how to improve efficiency/safety, how to push to market, support after hacking, and win-win development. Back then, introducing a VC or exchange listing opportunity was free of charge (omitting ten thousand sentences here), but now it’s all about various kickbacks, introduction fees, referrals, and management fees.

Really miss the pure us back then.