Ben is a master of the attention game, but the game must end.
Written by: wale.swoosh Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
How did Ben, a rising legend in the crypto world, go from a modest NFT player to a community leader who raised $6.9 million in 72 hours?
Over the past few days, Ben has been arguably one of the most controversial figures in Twitter’s cryptosphere. He launched the BEN token and partnered with BitBoy Crypto , and also launched one of the largest pre-sales of the current "meme summer".
Who is Ben?
Ben has been active in the NFT field since May 2021, and the first NFT he bought was Ola Volo's work "Siren of Glass".
Since then, Ben has been an active member of the NFT community, holding BAYC and Moonbirds, but parting ways with them after CC0's public controversy. At that time he was not enough to be called an influential person.
He occasionally tweets about events happening in the Web3 space, but not very loudly. Nor has he been involved in any major scandals or controversies.
His influence on Inspect has been negligible for a long time, but that's about to change...
Meme Summer
With the rise of PEPE and the arrival of the memecoin carnival season, Ben changed his usual, he began to tweet frequently and kept promoting memecoin.
This pitch has attracted a large number of participants, and the PEPE community is very strong. Many others in the field are doing the same thing, Pepe = engagament, and they pitch hundreds of times a day.
Ben's story could have ended there, an insignificant KOL turned memecoin shiller, as we've seen over the past few weeks.
Issue BEN
Possibly inspired by PEPE, Ben launched his own memecoin: BEN, which raised 55 ETH from 329 wallets during the pre-sale phase. This result is mediocre, BEN is not very promising, and the token has shown a downward trend after going online. Ben continued to post more tweets promoting his token, again all in all caps, to no avail.
Again, the story could have ended: someone issues a token, and the token goes to zero.
But a turning point came, because on May 8th this happened:
BEN then climbed sharply. Bitboy continued to tweet in support of BEN, and officially joined the "team" on May 9:
Despite Ben's promise that BEN would be his life's project, he handed it over to Bitboy less than 72 hours later.
Not only that, but just a few hours later, Ben announced his new project...
PSYOP pre-sale
On the same day, Ben released the PSYOP pre-sale announcement. From the start, he used BEN's success to gain fame.
Within an hour, he raised over a million dollars. By the end of the pre-sale, a total of $6.9 million had been raised.
He followed that up with more tweets in all caps, and the massive success of the presale had all crypto twitter talking about him. This in turn leads to more fomo.
Whatever you think of Ben, he's a master of the attention game. He bought a Milday with PSYOP's fundraising wallet, and the community freaked out: "He's using pre-sale funds for personal consumption."
In my opinion, he could have used other wallet operations; but he didn't, which may be another strategy to get attention.
Happy Ending?
The question is will this story end with a happy ending or a total disaster? I'm leaning towards the latter, and there's little sign this will work out.
For BEN's success, Ben took it as a proof of his ability, but BEN's success may be mainly due to Bitboy's participation and influence. Ben's achievement was to get in touch with Bitboy.
There will be an end to the attention game, as evidenced by the many precedents for NFTs and memecoins. Sooner or later attention will shift. Ben can buy 10 more Miladies, but the crypto market will forget about him at some point, always. The biggest advantage of Ben and his pre-sales is to use attention, but this may also be the reason for their eventual demise.
Either way, Ben's story will go down in history. It shows once again that the crypto world is all about attention and that sometimes the dice fall in unexpected ways.
