Project Upgrade Meets Changes in the Crypto World: Reflections of an Old Project Founder

Recently, our project is undergoing brand and mainnet upgrades while also conducting a coin swap operation, thus engaging with multiple trading platforms. As a project that has been building since 2017, we are quite familiar with these standard procedures. In addition to necessary compliance procedures and code audits, the remaining aspects mainly involve market budgeting, how to bring in new users and traffic, as well as how to benefit existing users. The project party needs liquidity and new trading channels, while trading platforms need users and trading volume, creating a mutually beneficial relationship.

However, after initial communication with the business department, we encountered some interesting judgments from the research department. They raised several points that could potentially prevent us from launching the trading platform or require an increased budget. I would like to share a few of the particularly interesting ones:

Firstly, they believe that our data popularity is insufficient, specifically reflected in the lack of social media and on-chain data. They also cited data from other projects in the same industry as examples. This left me puzzled; as a professional research department, can't they discern the authenticity of the data? A social media account with hundreds of thousands of followers has only a few thousand views and fewer than 10 comments on each tweet, which obviously defies logic. Similarly, in on-chain data, a transaction hash containing multiple transaction records is unlikely to be the result of ordinary user operations. Especially in the AI data labeling field, due to its professionalism and the high cost of subsequent data processing, it is unlikely that large-scale users would label data simultaneously.

Secondly, they emphasized the importance of endorsements from investment institutions. As an old project that has been operating for over 6 years, we have always relied on our own funds for development and have never accepted external investments. In our view, isn't this purely community-driven model, without institutional control, quite rare? However, in the eyes of the research department, this has instead become a sign of lacking formal institutional endorsement and being insufficiently legitimate.

The third question involves token circulation and valuation. Our tokens have all been unlocked, and the market cap is equal to the fully diluted valuation, with nearly 70% of the tokens locked in validation nodes. The research department believes this may lead to significant sell pressure, but I do not understand their logic. First, most of the tokens are in validation nodes, and we are a purely community-driven project; who would sell on a large scale? Second, as a project that has been operational for many years, we are already listed on multiple trading platforms; if we were to sell, why wait until now? Finally, the magnitude of sell pressure should be proportional to the market cap, and our AI data layer project, which has real business, products, customers, and revenue, has a market cap and fully diluted valuation of less than $100 million. Compared to those projects that are valued at $1 billion right after launch, our sell pressure risk is obviously much smaller.

There are many points worth criticizing, but I won't list them one by one here. I understand that the experts in the research department analyze a large number of projects every day and have their own views and evaluation criteria, which involve a lot of specialized knowledge. But shouldn't the most basic ability to discern authenticity be a given?

It is unknown when it started, but operations such as traffic fraud, data fraud, project skin-swapping (and even cases of founders changing skins), airdropping to studios and then being sold off by market makers, have surprisingly become the basic routine for projects to get listed.

Sometimes I feel that listing coins, especially early-stage projects, should be similar to venture capital, primarily focusing on the team's background. If listing coins relies on these tactics and operations aimed at exchanges and venture capital, the long-term development prospects of these projects are indeed concerning.

Having been in this crypto world for so long, we are not unfamiliar with these skills and tactics. The reason we don't do this is not that we can't, but that we are unwilling to do so. Because these actions ultimately only benefit studios, gray industries, and market makers, at the cost of retail investors' funds, the shift in developers' focus, and the decline of the entire industry.

Having experienced the bull and bear markets and the storms, we deeply understand the difficulty of staying true to our original intentions. Sometimes I really miss the partners I met during the ICO period in 2017/2018 (many of whom have already retired). The community at that time had limited resources, but every discussion revolved around how to improve efficiency and security, how to promote to the market, and how everyone worked together during hacking attacks, which truly reflected the spirit of mutual growth. Back then, introducing venture capital and listing opportunities on exchanges were done without charge, but now it's all about various kickbacks, referral fees, and management fees.

I really miss the pure us back then.