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Monday, August 11, 2025

The number goes up. The chart looks pretty. Investors clap. The marketing team slaps “record-breaking growth” in the next thread.

But behind the pixel-perfect dashboard is the same old scam:

a handful of insiders pumping fake life into a dead chain.

Daily Active Users — the sacred KPI of the modern protocol cult. Except most of the time, “users” aren’t people at all. They’re wallet farms, bot armies, and scripts spamming the network with meaningless transactions.

A single operator with a well-oiled botnet can mint hundreds of unique addresses in an afternoon, drip-feeding them into a dashboard until it looks like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

In reality, it’s just an empty parking lot with the lights turned up.

The playbook isn’t even clever. Wallet splitting turns one real user into twenty “active” ones. Contract interactions are scripted to fake volume spikes. Protocol incentives are gamed by insiders recycling the same funds through reward loops until the on-chain data screams “growth” — even if no human touched it.

And the kicker? Those same wallets disappear the moment the incentive pool runs dry.

They don’t call it fraud — they call it “bootstrapping the ecosystem.” Exchanges and analytics sites are happy to pass the numbers along without asking questions, because inflated activity feeds the narrative.

More “users” means more trading, more fees, and more chance the next greater fool buys the token at twice the price.

The protocol looks alive, the team gets their next round, and by the time the lights go out, the insiders have already moved on to the next chain that needs a crowd.

The cult keeps chanting: “Look at the numbers, we’re winning.”

But if you’ve been here long enough, you know the truth — the numbers are part of the con.

And every con needs an audience willing to believe.

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We are all rekt.