Is it the collapse of the personal image or the disillusionment with the industry? ZachXBT: It was a wrong investment after all

Written by Yangz, Techub News

After the Trumps issued their personal Memecoins TRUMP and MELANIA, the story of celebrity Memecoins continues. Yesterday, ZachXBT, a popular on-chain detective in the industry, was criticized after receiving 50% of the supply of the Memecoin of the same name created by community users and allegedly selling 16,348 SOL through OTC for a profit of about $3.89 million. On the one hand, many investors directly called ZachXBT for implementing rug in a form similar to TRUMP. On the other hand, some supporters said that ZachXBT deserved these rewards for his contributions to the industry over the years. (For readers who are not familiar with ZachXBT, you can read "From Victim to Whistleblower: The Story of ZachXBT, the Strongest Detective in the Cryptocurrency Circle")

So why did ZachXBT, known as the "Messenger of Justice in the Cryptocurrency Circle", make an uncharacteristic choice? In addition to the possibility that the persona he has worked hard to build over the years could not resist the temptation of interests, in fact, it is not difficult to see from ZachXBT's recent Twitter remarks that he is "extremely disappointed" with the development of the current industry.

After Trump announced the launch of TRUMP, ZachXBT once joked, "Make Crime great again." After @mickicrosschain, a member of the Router Protocol team, expressed his views on the recent incident involving the Trump couple, saying that "ZachXBT will be the busiest person in the cryptocurrency field in the next four years", ZachXBT responded, "One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't put making money first." In addition, ZachXBT also disclosed that it helped recover a large amount of funds when the US government suffered a $20 million hacker attack in October last year, but did not receive any rewards, and there are many experiences like this. ZachXBT said, "My time was wasted on such meaningless things, and I didn't get any rewards at all, but it distorted my view of doing good things." After seeing ZachXBT's depressed remarks, many netizens comforted ZachXBT. Polycarpus.eth left a message saying that ZachXBT is the conscience and moral compass of the industry, and will eventually reap rewards that cannot be measured in money. However, in the face of such encouragement, ZachXBT just replied "Nah I am cooked".

Seeing that consolation was ineffective, a community member created Justice for Zachxbt (token ZACHXBT) on pump.fun on the grounds of supporting ZachXBT (or perhaps taking advantage of investors' sympathy), and transferred 50% of the supply to ZachXBT's previously public wallet address investigations.sol. Influenced by the recent TRUMP and MELANIA, as well as ZachXBT's fame in the circle, ZACHXBT attracted a large number of transactions as soon as it was launched, and its market value exceeded US$90 million two hours after its launch. After receiving the 500 million tokens, ZachXBT also went against its norm (previously, ZachXBT had responded to the ERC-20 tokens it deployed, saying that it "never intended for people to speculate on my investigative work") and added them to the unilateral liquidity pool on Raydium (when providing unilateral liquidity for tokens on Raydium, the platform automatically purchases an equal amount of paired tokens, such as SOL, from the pool using the deposited tokens). An hour later, ZachXBT withdrew liquidity, withdrawing a total of approximately 91 million ZACHXBT and 16,111 SOL. Together with the LP fees given by Raydium, ZachXBT cumulatively transferred 16,348 SOLs to a wallet beginning with FjQBf, which was then sent to Wintermute. It is worth noting that ZachXBT subsequently locked the liquidity pool and added 96.19 million ZACHXBT (worth approximately $4.3 million) to it.

Affected by "ZachXBT withdrawing liquidity", FUD sentiment about "ZachXBT rug" began to spread in the circle, and ZACHXBT's market value also fell (at the time of writing, the market value was about 6.4 million US dollars). Investors represented by flock (6'3) began to complain about ZachXBT, saying that the good image it spent years building collapsed in an instant after defrauding investors' funds. But does withdrawing liquidity equal rug? In my opinion, the Memecoin was not issued by ZachXBT. Secondly, just like Vitalik and other bigwigs often sell unknown Memecoins received in their wallets, although the holding ratio may be less than 50%, if we insist that these behaviors are rug, do they count? As Andre Cronje concluded, ZACHXBT was built on the reputation of ZachXBT, and people bought the token crazily to push up the price of the token as a thank you for ZachXBT's efforts. When ZachXBT really sold the token, people were unhappy again. "Never change Crypto. Never change. It's nice to see that we are still attacking network contributors in this field."

Many KOLs also expressed their views on this matter. Ignas lamented, "The incentive mechanism of cryptocurrency is broken. Honest people don't benefit as much as opportunists. It's really hard to make a profit in the cryptocurrency industry under the premise of moral acceptance." AC commented, "This is not a problem unique to the cryptocurrency industry. In the end, good moral standards will be an obstacle. In a game where you can only tell the truth and your opponent can lie at will, you will always be at a disadvantage."

The cryptocurrency industry has no shortage of outstanding talents, some of whom have made a fortune, while others are still struggling in the industry. Ironically, while the industry is looking forward to the "golden age" under Trump's leadership, recent events have shown that this is still an industry where "profit comes first". Compared with profit, any cypherpunk ideals have to be put aside. Like the Trumps issuing Memecoin to "harvest" the cryptocurrency circle, ZachXBT and other people who have made significant contributions to the industry being ignored, and the recent Ethereum Foundation's "unmoved" response to community suggestions, is this really what this industry that we are proud of should look like?