The scams in the crypto market are often deeply hidden: project teams forge backgrounds, smart contracts have backdoors, and funds are transferred using anonymous wallets... Even if individual investors expend a lot of effort, they may not be able to see through all the disguises. However, Bubblemaps' Intel Desk uses a 'crowdsourced investigation' model to consolidate the dispersed strength of individuals into a tide of 'public fraud detection'—here, tech geeks, seasoned traders, and ordinary users each play their roles, piecing together fragments of clues to reveal the true nature of projects, allowing scams to 'die in the light' before they are exposed.
The core logic of Intel Desk is 'information sharing + token incentives'. Any user holding BMT tokens can initiate project investigation proposals, and other users can vote to decide the investigation priority; participants who upload valid clues (such as records of project team address associations, evidence of contract vulnerabilities) will receive BMT rewards; the final investigation report will be synced to cooperation platforms like exchanges and wallets, forming a 'risk warning network'. Last year, before a certain DeFi project went live, a user submitted a clue to Intel Desk: 'The project CEO's social account was called 'Li' six months ago, but now it's changed to 'Michael', suspected of forging an overseas background'; subsequently, a tech-savvy user uncovered that the contract code contained a backdoor function that could freeze user assets; even more users discovered that the project team's wallet had transferred funds to an address associated with a scam project from 2022—after these clues were verified by the community, the platform directly marked the project as 'high risk', ultimately successfully preventing nearly $30 million in funds from flowing into the scam.
The advantage of this 'crowdsourcing model' lies in 'covering information blind spots'. Traditional investigations rely on professional teams, inevitably missing risk points in niche areas, while Intel Desk's community members come from all walks of life: there are 'on-chain detectives' skilled in tracking fund flows, 'translation experts' who can understand multiple languages, and even 'business experts' who specialize in checking corporate registration information. A certain NFT project once claimed to 'collaborate with a certain international museum', and the official team found no anomalies on the museum's official website, but a community member working at the museum pointed out: 'The logo proportion in the collaboration announcement is incorrect; the genuine product has a security watermark'; subsequently, someone followed the clues to uncover that the so-called 'collaboration agreement' was photoshopped—these insights from within the industry are precisely what professional teams find hard to reach.
More critically, Intel Desk allows 'investigation results' to be directly converted into 'market actions'. The platform has partnered with data platforms like CoinGecko and DEXScreener; when a project is marked as 'fraud' by Intel Desk, its page on the cooperating platform will automatically display a risk warning; some exchanges even incorporate Intel Desk's investigation reports into their listing review criteria. Previously, a certain token was exposed on Intel Desk for 'team misappropriation of fundraising', and its listing plan was directly halted by the exchange, avoiding a subsequent large-scale redemption crisis. This 'investigation-warning-interception' closed loop makes it difficult for scams to spread.
Essentially, the Intel Desk is building a 'distributed trust system' in the crypto market. When the credibility of a single entity is insufficient, the cross-verification of countless independent individuals' clues can get closer to the truth; when centralized institutions have delays in their reviews, real-time community oversight can fill the gaps. This 'everyone is an investigator' model not only lowers the barrier to fraud detection but also turns the 'information symmetry' of the crypto market from an ideal into reality—perhaps one day in the future, the survival space for crypto scams will be completely squeezed by this power of 'collective governance', and the Intel Desk is an important starting point for this transformation.
