In case you haven’t seen the news, Walton Chain got themselves into a bit of a PR incident by hosting a coin giveaway via social media. However, now it appears the giveaway was fake as they replied under their own Twitter handle claiming they have won. So somebody forgot to switch accounts to post the fake response to the fake giveaway.

Although embarrassing, this brings up a much larger issue in the crypto space, and that is the fact that most of these “projects” are clever investment schemes, and not blockchain products.

The actions of Walton show a much larger issue where founders and project leaders are spending all of their energy to pump up the value of their coin through shilling, paid shilling, fake contests, and fake news instead of working on the technology itself.

What all this tells us is that these projects are nothing more than clever investment schemes, reminiscent of penny stock boiler room operations of the old days. The company itself being promoted has a great concept that you can sell people on quickly, but there is really no actual product or company there. The whole point is to drive up interest in the investment, causing fomo and driving up the price.

On the surface this should be obvious, but sometimes people get fooled because they see such a small amount of negative news in the crypto world. But if you think about it, these scams can be easily identified as nothing more than clever investment schemes and not real blockchain companies. For example, why would a company that is holding on to such revolutionary technology be running nickel and dime Twitter contest scams? The answer is simple, they don’t have the technology and never plan on delivering it. They need to resort to these boiler room tactics to keep the hype going because they have no product to show.







Another example of this is Cindicator which touts itself as “Hybrid Intelligence for effective asset management” which sounds as fake and empty as it really is. Recently it was revealed that Cindicator paid Youtuber DataDash for paid but undisclosed promotion of their project. For those that don’t know, Data Dash is a Youtuber who started several channels which all failed until finally he found success in starting a crypto channel. He filmed his episodes from what appears to be a spare bedroom in his parents home and often mentioned he was looking for his “first job” instead of an unpaid internship.

So this brings up the question, why would a project that boasts about being a “Hybrid Intelligence” and able to predict asset prices need to pay a kid who is filming out of his parents spare bedroom for promotion? Why don’t they just go to traditional market and technology experts? I will tell you why, because those experts will do research and ask questions, and reveal that projects such as Cindicator and Walton are just clever investment schemes with very little in the way of a tangible product. It’s all just buzz words, vague white papers, and social media shilling and paid promotions to drive up the price.

The bottom line is these clever investment schemes masquerading as blockchain projects actually outnumber the real blockchain projects. I recently did an article on Polymath, which falls right in line with the above examples of a clever investment scheme that has no intention of ever delivering a real product. They only have a few hundred lines of code and spend all their time giving talks and advertising their coin to drive the price up and not actually producing any working technology.