By Kimming@Cointime
Because I went to bed early last night, I missed a big show. Waking up in the middle of the night, looking at the phone, the group is talking about Pauly, oh, what is he doing again?
oh? Have you issued coins? ! I also hurried to see if I want to buy some, after all Pauly is an old acquaintance. Look at it again, someone has made money, and in just a few hours, dozens of ethers have been obtained, which is really amazing. Then if I buy it now, it may be too late, so let's not rush, go and see what follow-up news.
I don't know if I don't see it, except for a small number of people who made money, most of the rest are accusing Pauly of being a liar. After further research, oh, this time is a bit interesting. As expected of Pauly, reasonable.
Pauly0x
Before writing the analysis of this incident, let’s first get to know the protagonist of the story——Pauly. Here I can’t help but ask, is there anyone who doesn’t know who Pauly is, but who has attacked Pond0x again?
I learned most of the things about Pauly from a friend. Some of them have been verified, and some of them have not been verified. If you know more inside information or the truth, welcome to communicate with me and correct me.
The first time I got to know Pauly seriously, it should have started from fud BAYC (or from CryptoPhunks or Phunks for short? Forgot), the reason for fud BAYC is because the creation of the monkey image contains some Nazi elements, Insert some quotes here:
BAYC's Nazi allegations
No doubt you've heard by now that Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) founder Yuga Labs has been accused of being a racist Nazi. The main proponent of this theory is a man named Ryder Ripps, a creative director who has worked with world famous brands and big stars like Kanye West.
Ripps, who grew up in a Jewish household, had been collecting cases for months, regularly posting what he believed to be evidence on Twitter and YouTube. His claims were vague, flimsy, and (most importantly) largely disproved by experts at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization dedicated to stopping defamation of Jews.
As just one example, Ripps believes that BAYC's logo – a white ape skull bordered by white text on all sides – refers to the Nazi Totenkopf symbol. It's just that, like Ripps' other allegations, this claim is baseless. In this particular case, the ADL Center for Extremism analyzed Sign's claims, and they said they found nothing to support Ripps' assertion.
We're not going to debunk all the claims, as there are many articles and organizations that have done so. And they are all easily discoverable through ordinary search methods.
Regardless, on June 24, after months of Nazi allegations, BAYC co-founder Gordon Gunner (Wylie Aronow) took to Medium to dispel the rumors and set the record straight once and for all. This post, which readers can read for themselves (relatively short), directly addresses the four main assertions raised against them.
The latest development in this regrettable saga came on June 25 when BAYC's founder announced a lawsuit against Ripps, alleging that he intentionally devalued BAYC's original collection. We're sure to see the outcome of this farce in the end, but whatever the outcome of the trial is, it's largely irrelevant.
And here, Pauly is Ryder's friend and supporter. After that, they made a second creation of BAYC (mirror image) and put it on sale (it was once removed from the shelves by Opensea), probably for ridicule. After this incident, Yuga Labs sued the two of them for copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is undoubtedly a problem, but in this matter, BAYC has not cleaned up the suspicion of having bad elements in its creation. I don’t care about the Nazis and skulls for the time being. Many people asked me why I entered the NFT circle so early, but I didn’t buy monkeys. It's very simple, because when I was choosing, I saw the element of "Kamikaze". People who have a little knowledge of World War II should know what this is, right? Can BAYC cleanse this thing? I saw this thing, and I really can't buy it.
In the CryptoPhunks incident, Pauly's role is also quite interesting (his Twitter avatar is CryptoPhunks, and his profile says he is the founder of Not Larva Labs). Zagabond, the founder of Azuki, once tweeted that CryptoPhunks was a project he created and has been rugged (in layman's terms, he ran away with money).
On July 20, 2021, the team behind Phunks (dubbed Not Larva Labs) sent an open letter to Larva Labs, adopting the project's IP in the name of "true decentralization." (Because CryptoPunks are NFTs, holders do not own their copyrights, which is a very Web3 thing)
“Now is the time for the NFT community to wake up. It’s time to brave the resistance of censorship and make changes beyond our pervasive web2 systems,” the letter said.
Around the same time the letter was published, Zagabond said the Phunks project had been "handed off" to "community leaders."
Chopper, a member of the new Phunks team and developer of the post-Zagabond Not Larva Labs site, said there was no handover. According to Chopper, the Discord and Twitter logins and, most importantly, control of Phunks' smart contracts remain in Zagabond's hands.
"We asked them for this information multiple times and got nothing but silence," Chopper said in a Discord call.
Phunks are also royalty-free collectibles until January 2022, when the wallet that created the contract (which Chopper says Zagabond refuses to hand over) changes the royalty to 5%. This change coincides with the increase in trading rewards associated with the new LooksRare marketplace. Due to the low cost of collecting, Phunks are highly traded.
68 days after changing the royalty, the wallet used the exchange to convert over 310 ETH to USDC. (Royalties reset to 0% on the evening of May 9.)
Yes, Zagabond did not just imitate the market and run away, but also used the development of the new team community to adjust the royalties by owning the control of smart contracts, and put them in their own pockets. In the end, it seemed that under the pressure of Pauly and the community, the control of the smart contract was handed over, and the proceeds were returned to the community and the new team.
In fact, from here you can see that the two giants of Pauly's head portrait NFT project and their founders are well-founded. In other words, he is the black powder leader of Yuga Labs, and he is the Web3 player who ridicules once he sees Zagabond.
$PNDX
If Pauly is a special existence in the NFT circle, then he also has a special status in the meme coin circle. Pauly was extremely active in the previous $PEPE frenzy (shill at a high frequency in the early days), and some people even suspected that he was the one who issued the coin (but there is no evidence to point it out). And some time ago, it launched a fundraising campaign with the theme: "youget nothing" (you will get nothing). And announced an ENS address called YouGetNothing.eth. All of a sudden, a bunch of people were sending money into it. I didn’t see how much money I got in the end. I remember the last time I looked at the data, it was about 700 Ethereum. This operation, in fact, is obviously to satirize the behavior of Ben.eth (there is too much related content and easy to get off topic, please make up the lesson yourself), at the same time, it is even more satirical to those who donate to Ben, hoping to get airdrops and make money.
So, what happened to $PNDX this time?
In the first few days before the incident, Pauly would tweet from time to time about the meaning of Airdrop or currency issuance. Until the early hours of yesterday, a tweet was suddenly sent out, with little content: "Welcome to Pond0x", a website, a contract address and a few emoticons.
All of a sudden, go! A bunch of people rushed into the website and found that it was a Swap interface. Most of them chose to connect to their wallets and exchange them regardless of what happened! As more and more people poured in, the gas fee on the Ethereum chain skyrocketed, and the front-end of the webpage was also overloaded, crashing and unable to connect to the wallet.
A large number of people, when encountering this situation, became anxious and chose to exchange on Uniswap. And some people who successfully interacted on the official website went to Uniswap and found that the tokens in their hands had increased by more than a hundred times, and they sold arbitrage and left the market one after another. After a while, everyone finally realized that something was wrong. However, the data on the chain shows that there is a huge price difference between the tokens obtained on the website and those exchanged on Uniswap. After reacting, they all started to find out what went wrong.
Here is a tweet from Twitter user @0xAmazingChar, so that you can understand more easily what went wrong.
But in fact, anyone who knows Pauly knows that it's not that he doesn't understand, he actually did it on purpose.
Yes, Pauly deliberately designed the official website to look like a swap, but in fact, it is essentially an LP Farm.
Here, I will give myself a layer of armor first, and some people may question me: You are an afterthought. After something happened, you would look for analysis on Twitter, and then say that you knew it a long time ago.
But in fact, all of this is explained on the chain:
Well, some people may say that if you don’t know how to read the contract or how to check the chain, how do you know this behavior on the chain, and this will only be displayed after the operation. Well, in fact, as long as you look carefully, maybe you will understand.
Just click between the two token boxes to view the exchange process, it is simple and clear, and you can find the difference between it and the exchange in Uniswap.
You should also know where the price difference of more than a hundred times comes from. The pool on Uniswap was added later, which is equivalent to a secondary market. The above prices are all set by liquidity providers, so this is really funny.
In addition, a loophole in the contract that allows others to transfer the token at will was found later, and overwhelming negative comments flooded Pauly's Twitter. If it was an ordinary project party, it is estimated that they would either run away or have already apologized, but Pauly, those who are familiar with him know that he is going to make trouble again.
That's right, what he did was to keep posting tweets to ridicule, yes, it wasn't just to explain or shirk responsibility, but to blatantly mock.
To sum it up, the meaning is: how can I be cheated by saying that I am a liar? The code of the smart contract is announced, and I didn’t force you to go for it; it’s no problem to get it on my website, and no one asks you to exchange it on Uniswap. If you exchanged and lost money, you should find someone to settle the account, and you should also find Uniswap. I will not charge you the money.
But as of the time of writing this article, it seems that it is not over yet. Pauly's tweet stated that it's only the first chapter, and it's just getting started. A more detailed analysis can be found here.
epilogue
When this subject matter was given to me, my heart was tangled. Because if I write it, it is estimated that I will offend many people. It may offend the holders of BAYC, it may offend the teacher who brought the dog, and it may offend those players who lost money in this matter. Yes, although I don't agree with Pauly's approach, but I don't agree with everything with kamikaze elements, and I don't agree with the behavior of "slapping" a contract address when it is thrown into the group, and I don't agree with any Investing irresponsibly in yourself. There are a lot of things to talk about, I just hope everyone can remember that in the blockchain world, code is law, and DYOR before making any investment.
To quote a sentence from my friend: When you enter a casino, you don’t even look at the rules of the gaming table. If you lose, who would you cry to? (A friend of mine actually said it)
