Fake Traction in Crypto
The story of crypto is largely a story of companies trying to fabricate the illusion of traction with consumers.
Some of the more flagrant examples:
1. Fraudulent bot trading on exchanges. As much as 95% of all trading is bots. Typically a large stock like apple will trade 1% of its shares daily (32 million daily active shares versus 4 billion shares outstanding). Eos trades close to 100 percent of its shares daily. Why? Bots.
2. Bots used to game daily transactions on sites like blocktivity. It’s pretty easy to “engineer” a lot of activity, and “virus-apps” like eidos/rich do a great job of it. Telos is the number 2 chain by this metric. Uh huh.
3. Bots used to game sites like dappradar. Dice apps are huge violators. In many cases this is built into the app with “autobet” type settings. In other cases automated or semi automated bots create an illusion of app activity.
4. Volume numbers on apps used to justify traction. Many dice games and I suspect hex as well “salted the mines” by pumping $$ into their own tokens, faking demand. Several icos probably used this tactic as well.
5. Fake “partnerships” used to create illusion of big business buy in. Many of these are not more than vendor relationships. Company uses ms office, declares a relationship with Microsoft. Hundreds of examples.
6. Bot like apps (bsv weather comes to mind) used to justify amazing traction. If you really think bsv is used more than btc, you would be wrong.
7. Apps pushing transactions to the blockchain in the background. Example: Moonlighting pushing background entries to the EOS blockchain. I know of several other offenders.
Bottom line, be very careful when considering claims of blockchain traction. If the chain is impossible to use, has no clear intuitive applications, it almost certainly has no activity.
