The ‘Scalping Ecology’ in the Cryptocurrency Winter Project Parties are Skilled at PUA, Small Studios Complain Endlessly
In the cryptocurrency winter project, the parties involved are skilled at PUA and small studios complain endlessly about the scalping ecology.
Author: Deep Tide TechFlow Cleaner
On August 15th, when SEI/Cyber officially went online on Binance, the community was in an uproar, with many claiming to have been PUA/anti-lurked, and quickly reached a consensus: “Domestic projects only know how to PUA, without any vision, we still need to focus on foreign teams and high-financing projects for lurking.”
Some bizarre “rumors” also spread: the founder of SEI is actually the younger brother of Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo. SEI staff told Deep Tide TechFlow that this is purely a rumor, and the SEI founder team is all Americans. After investigation, it was found that this originated from the community’s ridicule of SEI, “progress always stays at 99%”, and then it was spread by word of mouth.
The hardest hit are the professional lurkers, and many people on Twitter exclaimed, “The lurker studio is about to face a wave of closures.” Indeed, we found that many small and medium-sized lurker studios have entered a state of suspension and shutdown.
Jin Lian relied on the airdrop of dydx\ens\arb to start a lurker studio and hired relatives and college students to lurk full-time. However, two months ago, he closed the studio, and Sui became their last masterpiece. “We have been investing without seeing any returns,” Jin Lian said. Most small and medium-sized studios are “feeding off the lurkers”. Previously, there were too high expectations, leading to blind expansion of personnel and addresses, shooting bullets (Gas) ahead of time, plus no new big lurkers, and the project side’s PUA has become more and more fierce. There is no wealth effect in the market, and lurker studios are already difficult to sustain.
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What makes Jin Lian reluctant to invest anymore is that “lurking is getting more and more intense, and their small studio can’t keep up with the big studios.”
In June of this year, a team held a Zksync offline event in Shenzhen, with more than 100 people attending, holding hundreds of thousands of addresses in total, and still growing.
In Jin Lian’s view, lurker studios have passed the era of being in the wilderness and are starting to move towards standardized and group operation. In the future, only large studios will have survival space.
A mature lurker studio should have:
(1) Infrastructure: such as a secure fingerprint browser; IP pool; own KYC…
(2) Loyal and obedient employees, including scientists;
(3) Money, able to persist for 2 years, or provide lurk or IPO services in advance to earn money and transfer risks to retail investors.
“The project side has also become shrewd, knowing that most addresses are just brushes, lurking and then running away, they will also find ways to counteract.” In this game, lurking is transitioning from “low cost, high returns” to “high cost, low returns”, or even “high cost, negative returns”.
It is not necessarily the project party that gets scammed, it could also be the studio itself.
Nowadays, the battle for Layer2 dominance represents both opportunities and hidden dangers.
Currently, all Layer2 solutions on the market have a centralized aspect, where transactions are packaged and sent to the chain through sequencers. The gas fees paid by users include two parts: the actual gas fees and the transaction fees, with a large portion going into the pockets of the project party.
Under the incentive of OP/ARB scams, a large number of people and funds have poured into the scamming industry, frantically searching for new public chains and Layer2 solutions that have not yet been launched. Among them, Layer2 is the absolute main force for interaction, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of addresses being generated, and a massive amount of ETH being used for “meaningless” interactions.
The Layer2 solutions are laughing all the way to the bank. With the operation of centralized sequencers, the ZkSync Era is earning a fortune from transaction fees, with scamming studios becoming their source of profit.
In addition, multi-chain scams have made “cross-chain bridges” a necessity, especially for Orbiter Finance, which focuses on low-cost cross-chain transfers on Layer2. It has become the biggest winner, making millions of dollars a month by collecting “bridge fees”, with over 90% contributed by scamming communities.
The emergence of OP Stack has made the “one-click issuance of Layer2” even more intense. Whether it is exchanges or project parties, they are all launching their own Layer2 solutions. Coinbase, Bybit, Frax, Gitcoin, DeBank… it can be foreseen that there will be even more Layer2 solutions in the future.
They first attract “scamming studios”. Even though they know that they may be the project party’s source of profit, many studios still follow one after another, taking a gamble, deeply interpreting the essence of PUA.
Regardless, the project party that issues tokens and earns transaction fees is the biggest winner in this scamming game.
