A New Lesson in Crypto Avarice That Might Also Enrich the People It Dupes

Last year, a social experiment called $GREED aimed to teach crypto enthusiasts a lesson by tricking them into tweeting an embarrassing message.

The project is back. This time, there’s real money at stake – a lot of it.

“During S*tcoin Season, any meaningless cryptocurrency with a Twitter account can convince thousands of investors to play memecoin musical chairs. They throw money at the wall and logic out the window, letting greed take over. Sometimes literally.”

That’s how I started my May 2023 story about $GREED, a social experiment that tricked crypto investors hoping to make a quick buck into embarrassing themselves on Twitter (now X). It was a lesson in common sense disguised as a money-making opportunity.

The moral of the story didn’t hold. In less than a year, speculators’ greed for memecoins has led them to trade their good judgment for too-good-to-be-true returns in order to get better once again. Earlier this year, pre-sale scammers selling private memecoins stole $122 million from get-rich-quick degenerates, according to on-chain detective ZackXBT.

I was interested to see how much SOL was sent as a result of the presale meta and calculated that >655,000 SOL ($122.5M) was raised from 27 presale. pic.twitter.com/dvsW4TSoov

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) March 19, 2024

It was the era of zero-sum casino games that gave crypto its dark reputation. Forget exchange tokens that traders believed were valuable, or well-known memecoins that went from pure jokes to billion-dollar jokes like DOGE or SHIB. These pre-sale tokens were outright scams. But people were willing to suspend their disbelief to get in early.

“This is so stupid, people are just going to get tougher,” $GREED creator Voshy said in an interview. “What kind of lesson are you going to teach these people?”

He decided to recreate his social experiment with a twist. Last time, he used the non-existent $GREED token to mock his “victims” without costing them any capital: he tricked them into accessing their Twitter accounts and allowed them to embarrass themselves by tweeting something embarrassing about their own greed.

This time, like last time, it would cost $GREED participants nothing and there would be no tokens. Instead, it would be the lure of a surprisingly lucrative staking freeze. Unknowing $GREED participants would lock their SOL in a staking account, safe from presale predators. While their money was working for them, it would also be working for $GREED: an educational initiative that Voshy hopes will teach the entire space a lesson.

The story continues

In the second episode of $GREED, Voshy began by tweeting vague promises of what appeared to be an upcoming GREED token airdrop. It did. Just like in 2023, crypto traders began scrambling for a token they knew nothing about.

Shortly after, Voshy upped the ante with a website that featured wallet-linking capabilities. People could now pledge their SOL to GREED. But for what? The website didn’t say it was holding a presale. It made no promises about what it was for or what people would receive. The details weren’t important; in the first hour, 1,527 wallets pledged 6,220 SOL (currently worth around $1 million).

Voshy’s experiment departed from scammy sh*tcoin pre-sales in this respect. Instead of taking people’s money in exchange for a token (or nothing at all, as the scammers do), Voshy’s website encouraged them to deposit their SOL tokens into a Solana validator. Once they signed off, they locked their tokens into that validator for six months, until mid-September.

“If we locked it down for three days, no one would care. We wanted people to notice, we wanted people to feel something, we wanted people to remember it, just like the last $GREED,” Voshy said.

The joker said that last year’s $GREED experiment taught its participants to be “very careful” about granting access to their social media accounts, or they would be embarrassed again. With this year’s $GREED, “we wanted to make sure people weren’t sending their assets out.”

Those who locked their funds in $GREED aren’t completely stranded. They can release their tokens by creating a governance proposal and then convincing 15 other $GREED contributors to vote to release their assets. Several hundred GREEDies have attempted to lobby for a return to liquidity, with mixed success.

“Vote for me if you hate the presale meta and will never message anyone again,” wrote one participant who was unable to unlock their SOL through voting last month.

An unexpected way to make money

One of the benefits of tricking people into staking their SOL during presale scam season is protecting their SOL from presale thieves. But there’s another lucrative benefit: staking yield. Staking SOL earns more SOL.

For those who can’t withdraw their funds through voting, there will be an option to withdraw them at Solana’s Breakpoint conference in September. At that point, the lockup will be released, and with it a bunch of extra tokens from $GREED’s partner protocols: Samoyed memecoin, Marms NFT collection, Texture, Famous Fox Federation, Racket, and Cyberfrogs. They all offered a variety of tokens and NFTs that will go to those who kept their funds in $GREED until the end.

“Everyone who puts their SOL there is going to get more than they would have if GREED was actually a token,” Voshy said. He reasoned: A good portion of them would have probably lost their SOL tokens to another scam if their money hadn’t been squeezed. Instead of losing that, they’re earning more through staking at a rate close to 8% per year.

Voshy said that while most validators receive a commission on the earnings from their staked assets, the $GREED validator run by Triton does not. All staking returns go to frozen stakers who lock up their SOL for months.

Voshy’s $GREED experiment aims to teach the entire space a lesson. While the validator at the center of it doesn’t take commission, he collects tens of thousands of dollars in SOL every month from trading tips. According to Voshy, all of that money will go toward educational initiatives.

“We mostly want to get people in the ecosystem to educate others,” Voshy said. He listed a few ideas: dapps that encourage learning about crypto, TikToks and YouTube videos, that kind of thing.

“It will be all crypto education and very Solana focused,” he said.

Altruism has turned $GREED’s validator into an unlikely success story. While a few thousand SOL were staked before the locked “gotcha” became widely known, a tsunami of SOL came after the news broke. The $GREED validator currently holds about 900,000 SOL tokens — a treasury worth about $150 million. More are still coming before the end-of-July deadline, he said.