When data fabrication and traffic bribery become standard practice on exchanges, what remains of the crypto industry?
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When data fabrication and traffic bribery become standard practice on exchanges, what remains of the crypto industry?
The current crypto industry is undergoing a trust crisis.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: danny
Recently, our project has been undergoing a brand/mainnet upgrade along with a token swap, so we've been in contact with major exchanges. Having built since 2017, we’re quite familiar with these standard procedures—beyond compliance requirements and code audits, it mostly comes down to marketing budgets, how many new users/traffic can be brought in, and how existing users can benefit. Projects need liquidity and new trading venues; exchanges need users and trading volume. It's mutually beneficial and completely understandable.
The interesting part comes after initial business discussions, when the research teams step in to evaluate. They raised several points either rejecting our listing or demanding higher budgets due to unmet criteria. Let me highlight a few:
First, they claimed our data and热度 (market traction) were insufficient—specifically citing weak social media metrics and on-chain data, giving us examples of other projects in the same space. I was baffled—aren't you all researchers who study projects daily? Can’t you tell real data from fake? Come on, a Twitter account with hundreds of thousands of followers but only thousands of views per post and fewer than 10 comments? You're telling me that’s genuine? And then there's on-chain data where one transaction hash contains dozens of trades. Are all your retail users experts who manually connect RPCs and batch transactions themselves? That doesn’t make sense. Especially for AI data labeling, which inherently has high barriers—how could there suddenly be massive numbers of annotators working on the exact same dataset? The cost of subsequent data validation and cleaning usually exceeds the labeling cost itself, making large-scale coordinated labeling nearly impossible unless you don’t care about costs at all—or your goal isn’t really about the data.
Second is institutional backing. Nowadays, almost every non-meme project needs VC support to get listed. But as an old-school project—from Function X in 2019 to today’s PundiAI, operating for over six years—we’ve always used our own funds. We never took a single dollar from external investors. From our perspective as “veterans,” isn’t this something admirable? Purely community-driven, no VC dumping pressure, and emotionally speaking, it carries a certain idealism. Yet to the research team, this translates into lack of formal endorsement, illegitimacy, and low热度. I don’t even know what to say…
Third is token circulation and valuation. Since 2019, all tokens have been unlocked, so our market cap equals FDV, with nearly 70% locked in validator nodes. The research analysts said, “There’s huge sell-off pressure.” Really? For starters, most tokens are held by validators, and ours is a purely community-led ecosystem—who exactly is going to dump? Secondly, we’re not some new project; we’ve already been on major exchanges before. After six years of ups and downs, if someone wanted to dump, would they wait until now and do it through your exchange? Thirdly, sell-off pressure correlates directly with FDV size. Our market cap and FDV are under $100M—an AI data layer with actual products, customers, revenue—valued below $100M. Why don’t you go check out those newly launched projects with $1B+ FDVs? If anyone has real sell-off risks, it should be them—especially during later stages!
There are many more complaints I could raise, but I’ll leave it here. I understand that research analysts review countless projects daily, each with their own frameworks and data dimensions, involving deep expertise. But at the very least, shouldn’t basic distinctions between truth and falsehood, integrity and manipulation, still exist?
I don’t know when it started, but traffic bribery, data bribes/fabrication, rebranded projects (I even heard of founder impersonation?), airdropping to farming studios, then handing tokens over to market makers for dumping—these have somehow become standard practices for getting listed.
Sometimes I think getting listed, especially for early-stage tokens, resembles venture capital investment—it should be about betting on people and the team’s character. If listings depend solely on tactics tailored for exchanges or VCs, then the long-term prospects of these projects are truly worrying.
We’ve been around this space long enough to know these tricks well. It’s not that we can’t do them—we simply choose not to. Because in the end, these schemes only enrich farming groups, gray-market operators, and manipulators. The cost? Retail newcomers’ money, builders losing focus on real product development, and the overall decline of the industry. (P.S.: Without bragging, today’s airdrop tactics are literally what we experimented with years ago.)
We’ve lived through bull and bear markets, weathered storms, and that’s precisely why we know how hard it is to stay true to your original vision. Sometimes I really miss the小伙伴们 I met during the 2017/18 ICO days (many founders I knew back then have already retired). Back then, communities might have been poor, but every discussion revolved around improving efficiency, enhancing security, pushing products to market, rallying together after hacks—building toward shared success. Introducing someone to a VC or helping secure an exchange listing? Done freely, no strings attached (countless stories omitted here). Now everything demands kickbacks, referral fees, commissions, management charges.
I genuinely miss the purity of who we once were.
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