Author: danny

Recently, the project is undergoing a brand/mainnet upgrade + token swap, so we have been in contact with major exchanges. From building since 2017 to today, we are quite familiar with these standard procedures, apart from the corresponding compliance procedures and code audits, the rest are mainly about the marketing budget, how many new users/traffic it can bring, and how to allow existing users to benefit, etc. The project side needs liquidity and new trading venues; the exchanges need users and trading volume, this is a win-win situation.

The interesting part is that after the simple business communication, it comes to the evaluation by the research department. They raised several points to reject our listing, or that we need to increase the budget due to certain conditions not being met. I'll pick a few interesting ones to talk about.

The first is that they said our data and heat are not enough, specifically reflected in the lack of social media data and on-chain data, and then they gave us several examples of projects in the same track. I was puzzled, you are the research department, researching projects every day, can't you see the authenticity of the data? Come on, an account with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, with only a few thousand views on the tweets below, and less than 10 comments, and you tell me this is real? And the on-chain data, each transaction hash contains n transaction records, are all the retail users of your project experts, able to do their own RPC interface packaging transactions? This is obviously unreasonable, right? Especially for professional AI data labeling, the threshold is high, it is unlikely that a large number of labelers will simultaneously label the same data set, and the subsequent data verification and cleaning costs are higher than the labeling itself, so it is even more impossible, unless you really don't care about the cost or your purpose is not the data itself.

The second is the investment institution endorsement. Nowadays, most projects (except meme) need the backing/support of major VCs to get listed. But as an old project, from FunctionX in 2019 to today's PundiAI, we have been building with our own money for more than 6 years, and from the perspective of us "old-timers", isn't this a good thing? Community-driven, no VC control, and emotionally, this is a very "sentimental" thing. But in the eyes of the research department, this becomes a synonym for no legitimate institutional backing, no heat. I don't know how to explain this...

The third is the token circulation and valuation. From 2019 to now, all the tokens have been fully unlocked, our MC = FDV, with nearly 70% of the tokens locked in the validator nodes. Then the big shots in the research department said that there is huge dump pressure, I was puzzled, not to mention that most of the tokens are in the validator nodes, we are a pure community market, who is going to dump it? Secondly, our token has been around for 6 years and has been listed on major exchanges, do we still need to go to you to dump? Furthermore, the dump pressure is positively correlated with the market FDV, our market cap and FDV are less than $100M, an AI data layer project with business, products, customers and revenue is only $100M, why don't you go look at those projects with FDV of $1B that have just launched, their post-dump pressure is more worthy of attention, isn't it?!

There are many other points I want to vent, but I won't go into them one by one. I can understand that the research big shots have to look at a lot of projects every day, and they have their own perspectives and data dimensions, and there are a lot of professional knowledge involved, but at least the basic truth and evil should be distinguished, right?

I don't know since when, traffic bribery, data bribery/forgery, project skin-changing (I've even heard of founder skin-changing?), airdrop to studios, and then handed over to MMs to dump, have become the basic operations for projects to get listed.

Sometimes I feel that getting listed, especially for early tokens, is very similar to venture capital, you are investing in the bottom color of the people/team, if the listing is all about these means and operations to the exchanges, to the VCs, then the future development of these projects is really worrying.

We have been in this circle for so long, we are aware of these tricks and means, not that we can't do it, but we don't want to do it. Because in the end, these things will only benefit the studios, the gray industry, the big players, at the cost of the money of the new retail investors, the shift of the builder's focus, and the decline of the entire industry. (P.S.: To be honest, these airdrop tricks are the ones we played with in the past.)

We have seen the bull and bear markets and the storms, so we know how hard it is to keep our original intention. Sometimes we really miss the fellow ICO participants in 2017/2018 (many of the bosses we knew back then have already retired), the community was poor back then, but every time we talked, it was about how to improve efficiency/security, how to push to market, and when there was a hack, everyone came to the rescue, etc., we grew together. Back then, introducing a VC and an exchange listing opportunity was free of charge (omitting 10,000 sentences here), and now it's all kinds of rebates/referral fees/management fees.

We really miss the pure old days.