Every day reinforces my belief that LARPing and scamming are profitable in this space, and there’s no getting around it. More so than elsewhere in finance or everyday life, where, depending on the country and context, there are at least some legal boundaries that people respect because crossing them can have consequences. Here, practically anything goes. What keeps it going is a following that isn’t critical enough, doesn’t understand enough and is too blinded by greed to care. The rot goes deeper than individual scammers or their followers. It’s embedded in a culture where harming other people has become an accepted part of the game, even an opportunity to get rich. And what standards are we supposed to expect when official accounts and founders are right at the front, promoting gambling and cheering on autocrats and scammers? A small number of us recognised this years ago. Others have only acknowledged it in recent weeks, despite being part of the same machinery themselves, and now want to present themselves as perceptive voices warning everyone else. The rest simply don’t care, because there’s still $1, $100 or $100,000 to be made as long as somebody else keeps playing. It’s also telling how many people say self-custody matters to them while continuing to trade on CEXs or platforms where they hand control over to someone else. They do this in an industry where security flaws and warnings get ignored because keeping the money flowing takes priority. An industry whose established players have secured their positions so thoroughly that your chances often depend on whether you had the right contacts early enough. I refuse to accept that as the way things have to be, and you shouldn’t accept it either. And I accept that taking this stance has severely hurt my growth here and left me with very few people with a larger following I can stand alongside. Even those few tend to disappear the moment it’s their turn to do something for me, and I suspect many of you know exactly what that feels like. Liking a post from some fucking idiot who has contributed nothing to moving this space forward, just because he briefly interrupts his PnL screenshots to publish something critical, won’t change any of this. It rewards another performance while the people doing useful work continue to be ignored. We need to change how we behave, who we reward and what we support. Find the people actually building something useful and providing value consistently, including when nobody is paying attention. Pay attention to what they do over time, instead of handing credibility to whoever discovers a conscience when warning people becomes an easy way to collect likes.

I’ve put another little tool I’d been using for my own research online. Free for everyone. Pick a Pump shitcoin and see how much it’s generated in creator fees. Or look up a wallet and see which tokens have paid it fees and how much it’s collected. I’m expanding it to show which wallets launched which shitcoins, how many they’ve launched and how much they’ve made from them. Pretty useful when someone’s selling you their “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for the seventeenth time. I’ll bring it into the MASTRtrade terminal and connect it with over 40,000 names and 90,000 wallets. Then link it with Bloodhound and the other research tools so you can follow where the money went afterwards. That integrated version might become a Pro tool. There’s quite a bit more you can uncover once those pieces are connected. For now, the standalone tool is free and still running on free APIs. If 20 of you start digging at once, give it a moment. Have fun diggin mastrtrade.com/trackfees