NFT project was actually a "social experiment" designed to shed light
Rebeca Moen Feb 06, 2023 12:03
Little Shapes' creator said he lied about his past to promote his exposé.
Little Shapes NFT was first conceived as a "social experiment," as disclosed by Atto, the pseudonymous originator of the project. The goal of the "social experiment" was to bring light on large-scale nonfungible token (NFT) bot network frauds on Twitter.
Since late December 2022, Little Shapes has been receiving a significant amount of attention from the crypto community as well as the media. This is because the creator of the company was featured in multiple tweets that went viral and detailed events in his life that sounded too fantastic to be true.
A man woke up after being in a coma for five months, discovered that he had assets locked on FTX, told his wife about it, and then discovered that she had been cheating on him with other individuals in the NFT business. These are just a few examples.
However, the exposé was based on true events. "Here's how a ring of influencers and entrepreneurs sucked more than $200 million out of the ecosystem across 274 projects," Little Shapes NFT stated, adding that: "Over the course of the previous year, NFT Twitter has been managed and controlled largely by a lone Twitter botnet." The majority of its appearances were in February 2022, and it was put to use in combination with a network of influential people and beta testers in order to sell out projects.
The actual paper has a heading that reads, "The insider NFT bot network that's been dominating the market behind the scenes."
It claims that from February 2022, a huge number of low-level NFT ventures have used bot networks to artificially develop excitement and legitimacy in an effort to scam investors. This was done in an attempt to pull the wool over investors' eyes.
During an interview that took place on February 2 with BuzzFeed News, Atto, who is also the creator of BALLZNFT, referred to Little Shapes as "performance art" and emphasised that "people don't pay attention until you give them a reason to."
He added, "I needed a tale that sells to ensure that no one would disregard a story that hurts," and that was exactly what he did. "I needed a story that sells."
The paper refers to bot networks such as "Dmister" that provide social media engagement as a crucial channel for NFTs projects and only price around one hundred dollars for every one thousand likes, retweets, and responses purchased.
The BALLZNFT team even promoted Little Shapes NFT by using Dmister as an example of how it works in order to spread awareness about their product.
Image source: Shutterstock