Original text from: Honest Mai Zong
Playing with secondary altcoins to make money, especially with new coins, is essentially a game of predicting market manipulation. If you put yourself in the position of the project team issuing the coin, you’ll realize why shorting in 99% of cases is the optimal solution in this game.
My name is Ram, a Stanford graduate with a major in blockchain infrastructure and distributed systems. In my previous life, I was that genius boy who wanted to 'change the world with code.'
When I graduated, I turned down several offers from Silicon Valley VCs and came to Web3 to start a business. After three years of hard work with my team, we launched a project with a fair start and fully open-source contracts, even handing the governance contract over to the community. Before the launch, I eagerly wrote a 30-page security audit manual and a personal letter to the community.
At that time, I was really foolish, foolish enough to think sincerity and hard work could earn recognition.
Finally, the time for the project's TGE arrived. Five minutes after the project went live, the market cap shot up to 300 million dollars. I excitedly called my partner, saying we were finally going to succeed!
Just as I was immersed in the joy of 'success,' several things happened almost simultaneously:
Market Maker: The 'market maker' that reached a strategic cooperation with us originally told us they would only provide passive market making and would help us stabilize depth and manage liquidity with orders.
However, in the first 5 minutes after the token went live, they used 500 wallets on-chain to conduct AB dual-direction wash trading, pushing the token price above 300 million dollars and creating a false impression of a surge; then, after the first users FOMO bought in, they sold off the chips we had lent out for passive market making, leaving retail investors standing at the peak.
After offloading, they even spread in the community that 'the project side is secretly offloading, we were also crashed.'
I called to question them, and the other party calmly said: 'Don't take it too seriously, brother. You don't understand market behavior. We'll help you get it going after the second phase.'
Exchange: A week before the project launch, I received a call from the BD of Exchange X. He sounded sincere, saying, 'We are optimistic about your project,' 'The platform needs to support builders,' and emphasized, 'We have internal consensus that your project has solid technology and isn't a scam or a pump-and-dump.'
We decided ---- to waive the token fees for you and additionally give you the homepage banner position.
The BD told me: 'You just need to give our exchange some activity tokens; this part is not for us, it's just for the trading activities for your hype, all for retail investors.'
I initially refused. Because my original intention was to launch based on real users and community consensus, not 'pulling channels' or 'making quotas'; this part of the allocation was originally meant for community airdrops.
But my partner said: 'This is an opportunity; don't be too idealistic.'
In the end, I still compromised.
I transferred 5% of the tokens that should have been used for community airdrops to the internal control address they provided, and left a message for the BD emphasizing: 'This is for the exchange's activities, to be released linearly over 3 months, and must not crash the price.'
The other party replied with four words: 'Don't worry, brother.'
On the night the project went live, the TG group was packed, and the hype shot straight to CoinMarketCap's homepage. I saw our token logo on the exchange's homepage banner.
But it seems to differ from what the BD promised me at the time. This trading competition had a total of 50 projects participating simultaneously, with a prize pool of 1000 USDT.
I felt a slight unease, but since I was busy with TGE matters, I didn't think too much about it. Perhaps the main event from the exchange hadn't gone live yet.
Our token surged 10 times just 5 minutes after launch. Just as I was feeling proud and thanking supporters in Discord, the on-chain data suddenly exploded:
- In the 6th minute, the BD transferred our activity tokens from my exchange operating wallet to the exchange's internal executive wallets through 9 disguised wallets, going on a selling spree.
- In the 7th minute, the community started to panic, saying, 'Someone is crashing the price,' and instantly the price dropped by over 30%.
I called to inquire about the situation, and that BD sounded indifferent: 'We cannot interfere with market behavior'; I then contacted the 'market person in charge' who received the tokens, but my call was directly hung up. Shortly after, I received a message on Telegram: 'Don't be too idealistic; the market is like this.'
Ironically, the next day, the exchange released a 'market statement' saying the project was 'not prepared enough and the contract was immature,' and to 'protect users,' they would delist the trading pair.
I was confused; I wanted to clarify, but no one believed this 'scammed' Builder. KOLs didn't speak up, the media didn't report, and there was nowhere to defend our rights.
At that moment, I realized that I was not attacked by hackers or brought down by technical flaws; I was the one who had told myself in the past 'don't crash the price' and ended up personally sawing off my faith.
I also considered whether I could use my own funds to pull the price back up, but the market maker and exchange had already distributed nearly 15% of the chips, and the two million dollars we raised had already been mostly consumed during development, making it really hard to recover those chips.
Three days later, our token price fell from $1.3 to $0.013. As the token price went to zero, the TVL that had come for the airdrop also went to zero. The community exploded with comments all saying 'scammers, come out,' and my inbox was filled with legal letters from investors.
I wrote an apology post on my blog, signing my name: 'All responsibility is mine; the project failed, but my original intention remains unchanged.'
No one finished reading it.
They only took a screenshot on-chain of the transactions from the founder's wallet to the market maker and exchange wallets, then said: 'See, it was indeed the founder who crashed the price and ran away.'
That night, I closed my laptop and didn't open it again.
At 3:46 AM, I smiled at the plummeting token price, my heart ached.
My consciousness was hazy; the last thought was:
'Next time we launch, I must be the first person to crash the price.'
