The AI sector has been cold recently, and most tokens have experienced a sharp correction. Among them, several AI on-chain meme projects have also ushered in the end of zero in this correction. Although the community knows that most of the new AI projects are hyped with MEME logic, they may not have expected that the project party would really put this point on the table. Update the project progress one day, and issue a declaration of running away the next day, and the reasons are mostly the same: KOLs have sold too much and can't pull it up.
The day before yesterday, the AI project Tensor Space, which had fallen nearly 80% from its peak, published a tweet, dealing the final blow to its token TPU on its way to zero.
The tweet reads: “More than 80 KOLs participated in our private token sale. Our marketing managers and social media managers recently conducted another token sale, but during the process, some disputes occurred between them and the KOLs. As a result, these KOLs started to sell a large number of TPU tokens at once.”
As can be seen from the token trend chart, the launch price of TPU is $0.002. If the price of the chips owned by KOLs is calculated based on the launch price (it should actually be lower), these KOLs can gain more than 26 times in 4 days. Tensor Space wrote in a tweet, "These opinion leaders have earned more than six figures by selling tokens."
Tensor Space's attitude is quite sincere. It said in a tweet that it plans to launch its decentralized application and intends to reissue tokens. All TPU holders will receive new tokens with a transaction tax of 0. "We are very sorry for this situation. Although most teams may choose to disappear, we choose to stay and hope that TPU can stand up again!"
After the tweet was sent, TPU fell by more than 80% in 3 hours.
BlockBeats once wrote in " A 20-fold increase in one weekend, the AI Summer of the crypto market is coming " that in many new AI projects that have been born recently, the comment section is full of cooperation requests from alpha KOLs. These projects were able to quickly gain community attention in the early stages, which was inseparable from the efforts of the KOLs who shill. Now it seems that KOLs can not only help projects take off, but also quickly "end" the life of the project.
Scalia, which lists itself as an AI, Depin, and RWA project and is also trying to build an L1, quickly started to return to zero after a 37-fold increase in one month, with a drop of more than 90% in the past two weeks. The day before yesterday, Scalia's official Twitter account stated that it had repurchased $100,000 worth of tokens to help the token grow, but such measures are obviously a drop in the bucket for the huge shrinkage of the market value from $70 million to $3 million.
After the downward trend became irreversible, Scalia’s team published a long article yesterday, tactfully pointing out that KOL selling was the biggest reason for this situation.
“Many KOLs received tokens in the early days of the Scalia project as a reward for their long-term support of the project. Unfortunately, because they believed that other projects were “scam projects”, they sold a large number of tokens in other projects and also sold Scalia tokens. Since Scalia is still an emerging capital market and there is not enough liquidity, these actions have a considerable impact on the project.”
Two weeks ago, another AI streaming project, EtherFlix, also cited KOLs’ selling of tokens as the reason for its inability to sustain in its “escape declaration”.
“I also need to express my disappointment with the paid shill. Even though they have received the tokens and ETH they paid, their subsequent behavior is frustrating. After the price rose by 20-50%, they chose to sell their tokens, which greatly affected our efforts to increase the popularity of the project. When we were busy looking for more influencers to promote our project, these people’s sales caused more holders to sell their tokens. They unfairly put the blame on me.”
The day before this tweet was released, EtherFlix was still warming up for its product, "Etherflix is coming out, we will bring changes to AI creators." After EFLIX returned to zero, no recommendations about the EFLIX token could be found on Twitter.
The "soft run" of several projects has caused more new AI project tokens to fall sharply. For the "affected" projects, this has given them a new reason to fall in front of the community. Yesterday, the Official Twitter of zKML, a new project related to AI, posted a dynamic statement saying, "Despicable developers (peers) have caused many projects, including zKML, to face panic." Its token ZKML has fallen 90% from its high point.
Who is to blame for the project's plunge? Chain Detective ZachXBT tweeted the day before yesterday, saying "Unfollow and block these KOLs who are trying to sell you empty projects." Among the four KOLs mentioned, three have changed their names and continue to post new updates.
No matter what happened between KOLs and project owners from mutual assistance to backstabbing, the only victims were the investors who put in real money. As one comment pointed out, you might even expect a meme team rug, but these projects that pretend to be doing something are even more abominable. They attract people who think they are investing in alpha, which is worse than the influence of meme rug.
AI has been recognized as this year's "wealth code". Since AI projects are difficult to operate and their combination with Crypto requires more exploration, it provides opportunities for many small workshop teams to absorb the liquidity of investors who do not understand AI technology but want to reap alpha returns. "KOL selling" can become a public statement for the end of an "AI" project, perhaps just putting the PVP characteristics of crypto investment on the table.
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