A number of foreign and Chinese media including CoinDesk, The Block, etc. released a financing news on 4/10. The encryption start-up named "CryptoGPT" received US$10 million in financing and a valuation of US$250 million. This new company, which directly combines the name of "crypto" (encryption) and GPT (ChatGPT), has attracted a wave of disgust, and it has even been reported that the investor DWF Labs is related to fraudulent cryptocurrency.
CryptoGPT raised $10 million, is the popular keyword really effective?
Ark Invest (Chinese: Ark Investment), the investment fund most supportive of cryptocurrencies, once said in the 2023 Big Ideas report: "Artificial intelligence is the most important catalyst for explosive growth, but it has a low correlation with the blockchain." But this will not Quench the blockchain industry's interest in the "AI topic". After all, it is the hottest topic nowadays, and CryptoGPT is an extreme case.
CryptoGPT is a "L2" blockchain (ZK-layer 2) based on "Zero-knowledge Proof". The keywords are all included, and even the token is called GPT.
CryptoGPT announced on 4/10 that it has received US$10 million in financing and a valuation of US$250 million.
It seems that as long as you add various popular concepts, you can successfully raise funds?
CryptoGPT Fundraising Causes Resentment?
A well-known encryption commentator @adamscochran said that many teams with actual products are struggling to raise funds, but this kind of air project that mixes multiple popular keywords has received large amounts of financing. He also said that whoever invested in such a project, he will definitely visit with his investment portfolio, because they invest indiscriminately.
Other well-known encrypted Internet celebrities also came out to make complaints, including Cobie who spread rumors about Changpeng Zhao, and ZachXBT who exposed the fraud of Ma Ji’s brother Huang Licheng.
CryptoGPT Bot: I am ChatGPT
The product page of CryptoGPT includes the AI chat robot Alex . Unexpectedly, after many netizens tried it, they found that it was just ChatGPT at all, and there were many funny answers. Chain News also actually tried these Q&As:
"Are you ChatGPT?"
CryptoGPT Bot: Yes, I am a language model powered by OpenAI's GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) technology, designed to assist with various tasks and answer questions to the best of my ability.
"Did Jamila Jelani and the team at CryptoGPT do something for you?" (Jamila Jelani was mentioned as the founder, original post has been deleted)
CryptoGPT Bot: As an AI language model, I have no personal interaction with individuals or teams. However, Jamila Jelani and the team at CryptoGPT may have used OpenAI's language models (such as GPT-3) to develop their own AI applications or projects. OpenAI's language models are powerful tools for natural language processing tasks such as text generation, translation, and sentiment analysis.
CryptoGPT does use ChatGPT directly as a product.
Did the CryptoGPT team fabricate the CEO?
CryptoGPT has announced that the founder is Jamila Jelani, who works for Alibaba Group, but is a marketing staff on the official website. In addition to the inability to obtain relevant evidence, the current posts and introductions of this person no longer appear on Twitter and the website.
Chain News Search Inventory Page:
Twitter netizen @satoshi_trump is investigating Jamila Jelani and Dejan Erja , who is known as the chief technology officer. Neither can find evidence of relevant professional experience. At the same time, although they claim to have many years of employment experience, their LinkedIn pages are only newly created this year. He bluntly said that Jamila Jelani is likely to be automatically generated by AI.
@satoshi_trump also investigated CryptoGPT's domain registration time, Twitter account, and smart contract deployment time, and found that they were all done this year. It does not match the official statement that it will start in the third season of 2022.
CryptoGPT Investors & Market Makers: DWF Labs?
After the media publicized the valuation of CryptoGPT as high as 250 million U.S. dollars, and obtained 10 million U.S. dollars in financing from DWF Labs, Dejan Erja, the chief technology officer of CryptoGPT, took the initiative to explain to the media that in fact, only 420,000 U.S. dollars was obtained, and the rest will be divided into 285 days. invest. At the same time, DWF Labs will also be a market maker for CryptoGPT.
However, the community’s doubts about DWF Labs will not stop because of this. Twitter netizen @nay_gmy conducted an investigation and found that this investor is very problematic. Not only the actual investment does not match the claim, but the person in charge may also be related to the cryptocurrency giant. It is related to OneCoin's scam.
@nay_gmy's on-chain data survey found that DWF Labs' investment seems to be almost all transferred to the exchange after the tokens are obtained, and the behavior is not like lending or market making.
DWF Labs is very active in South Korea. Many South Korean projects will announce new investment transactions, but most of them do not mention the actual amount invested by DWF Labs. There are projects that disclose the amount, but the data on the chain does not match.
@nay_gmy said that DWF Labs still has investments in many well-known projects, and the claimed amount does not match the actual information on the chain. With an investment of over $150 million claimed, only $65 million was actually found on-chain.
What might DWF Labs do in business?
@nay_gmy said that DWF Labs, which was still unknown six months ago, began to invest more than 200 million US dollars, and only invested in tokens in circulation and stored them in exchanges. @nay_gmy guesses that DWF Labs sells coins for no less than a certain price for the project team, and earns 10-20% discounted profits on different transactions. But why call it "strategic cooperation" and "investment"?
DWF Labs Managing Partner Involved in OneCoin Scam
On the official website of DWF Labs, managing partner Andrei Grachev is the first member of the team. He also accepted an interview with CoinDesk, claiming that DWF has been making markets in traditional finance since 2016.
@nay_gmy said, however, Andrei Grachev has also been accused of operating multiple crypto scams since 2018, including ICO fundraising, but ultimately did not launch a product; he was even reported by Russian media in 2019 as the executive director of Huobi Russia For a long time, he has expressed in public that he hopes to exclusively list the OneCoin tokens of the fraud project on Huobi.
@nay_gmy said he hoped there was a rationale for these things and that he got it wrong. But it's not looking good right now.
He also shows the address of DWF for community observation. Before the deadline, the value of tokens in this address was only 9 million US dollars.
