From being sought after by thousands to being criticized by thousands, KOLs have become scapegoats after the hype craze

Author: Joyce; Source: BlockBeats

The AI ​​sector has been cold recently, and most tokens have suffered a sharp correction. Among them, several AI dog projects have also ushered in the end of zero in this correction. Although the community knows that most of the new AI projects are hyped with the logic of MEME, they may not have expected that the project party would really put this on the table. Update the project progress the day before, and issue a declaration of running away the next day, and the reasons are mostly the same: KOLs have sold too much and can't pull it up.

The day before yesterday, the AI ​​project Tensor Space, which had fallen nearly 80% from its high point, issued a tweet, giving its token TPU a final blow on its way to zero.

The tweet reads: "More than 80 KOLs participated in our token private placement. Our marketing managers and social media managers recently conducted another token sale, but during this process, some disputes occurred between them and the KOLs. As a result, these KOLs began to sell a large number of TPU tokens at one time."

As can be seen from the token trend chart, the TPU listing price is $0.002. If the price of the chips owned by KOLs is calculated according to the listing price (which should actually be lower), these KOLs can reap more than 26 times the increase in 4 days. Tensor Space wrote in the tweet, "These opinion leaders have earned more than six figures by selling tokens."

Tensor space's attitude is quite sincere. It said in a tweet that it plans to launch its decentralized application and intends to reissue tokens. All TPU holders will receive new tokens and the transaction tax will be 0. "We are very sorry about this situation. Although most teams may choose to disappear, we choose to stay and hope that TPU can stand up again!"

After the tweet was sent, TPU fell by more than 80% in 3 hours.

BlockBeats once wrote in "A 20-fold increase in a weekend, the AI ​​Summer of the crypto market is coming" that in many new AI projects that have been born recently, the comment area is full of cooperation requests from alpha KOLs. These projects can quickly get community attention in the early stage, which is inseparable from the efforts of the KOLs who shout orders. Now it seems that KOLs can not only help projects take off, but also quickly "end" the life of projects.

Scalia, which lists itself as an AI, Depin, and RWA project, and is also trying to make an L1, quickly started to return to zero after a 37-fold increase in one month, and has fallen by more than 90% in the past two weeks. The day before yesterday, Scalia's official Twitter account stated that it had repurchased $100,000 worth of tokens to help the token grow, but such measures are obviously a drop in the bucket for the huge shrinkage of the market value from $70 million to $3 million.

After the decline was difficult to reverse, the Scalia team published a long article yesterday, tactfully pointing out that KOL selling was the biggest reason for this situation.

"Many KOLs received tokens in the early stages of the Scalia project as a reward for their long-term support of the project. Unfortunately, because they believed that other projects were "scam projects", they sold a large number of tokens in other projects, and also sold Scalia's tokens. Since Scalia is still an emerging capital market and does not have sufficient liquidity, these actions have a considerable impact on the project. ”

Two weeks ago, another AI streaming project EtherFlix also cited KOLs selling tokens as the reason for its failure to sustain in its “runaway declaration”.

"I also need to express my disappointment with the paid KOLs. Even though they have received the tokens and the ETH they paid, their subsequent behavior is frustrating. After the price rose by 20-50%, they chose to sell their tokens, which greatly affected our efforts to increase the popularity of the project. When we were busy looking for more influencers to promote our project, these people's sales caused more holders to sell their tokens. They unfairly put the blame on me."

The day before this tweet was posted, EtherFlix was still warming up for its product, "Etherflix is ​​coming out and we will bring changes to AI creators." After EFLIX returned to zero, no recommendations about EFLIX tokens could be searched on Twitter.

The "soft run" of several projects has caused more new AI project tokens to fall sharply. For the projects that have been "affected", this has given them a new reason to fall in front of the community. Yesterday, the official Twitter account of zKML, a new project related to AI, said, "Despicable developers (peers) have caused many projects, including zKML, to face panic." Its token ZKML has fallen 90% from its high point.

Who is to blame for the project's plunge? Chain detective ZachXBT tweeted the day before yesterday, bluntly saying "Unfollow and block these KOLs who sell you empty projects." Among the four KOLs pointed out, three have changed their names and continue to release new dynamics.

Whatever happened between KOLs and project owners from mutual assistance to backstabbing, the only victims were the investors who invested real money. As one comment pointed out, you might even expect a meme team to rug, but these projects that pretend to do things are even more hateful. They attract people who think they are investing in alpha, which is worse than the impact of meme rug.

AI has been recognized as this year's "wealth code". Because AI projects are difficult to operate and their combination with Crypto requires more exploration, it provides opportunities for many small workshop teams to absorb the liquidity of investors who do not understand AI technology but want to reap alpha returns. The fact that “KOL selling” can become a public statement for the end of an “AI” project’s operation may just put the PVP nature of cryptocurrency investment on the table.