So there's this dude. Jeremy. He's a Pokemon VGC competitor. Pretty good resume, lots of points, a championship, all in all a good player. Recently (read: January 29th), posted a small tweet thread talking about earning money playing VGC competitively and how he was sad that, in spite of how far things had gotten, Pokemon probably wouldn't ever be a competitive eSport.
That's when he announced he'd been working with two other Pokemon players... On an NFT PvP game.
So, it's an NFT on-chain game. Or, wait, is it? It's also free to play, according to Jeremy. And it's supposedly also going to be off-chain as well, and the on-chain elements are mostly there for prize support. And also it's an MMO, because an NFT project can't also not be an MMO.
The real thing I took away from this was not, for instance, that people you might respect can instantly have a heel-turn and peddle a ponzi scheme in no time flat while secretly working on the project for months (the Kuroro Beasts twitter account was made in November, and Jeremy only tweeted about it at the end of January, that's up to two months of dev time before bringing the idea in front of his "normal" non-crypto audience). It wasn't how quickly feature creep hits these kinds of projects, with plans quickly bloating with extra projects, MMOs, comics, and various tie-ins before the dust even settles.
It's that no matter how hard crypto people try to be legitimate, they just cannot help looking like a scam and fostering other scams.
In case the terminology isn't familiar to you, a whitelist (WL) in the crypto space involves having your address whitelisted to be part of the first group to be allowed to buy the coin in an ICO/NFT in an NFT project. Generally, people who are whitelisted have a way better time turning a profit than those who show up later, so the goal of winning a WL giveaway is generally to make more of a profit than your average joe. These giveaways are everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, you can easily follow down a humongous rabbit hole of crypto projects advertising whitelist giveaways for other crypto projects that are advertising whitelist giveaways for other crypto projects, etc. etc. Every page Kuroro links to looks just like Kuroro's, in that it's a flurry of giveaways and RTs to other giveaways and promises of amazing things.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't projects that attempt to look professional. Another example that I saw was Nym, propped onto my unsuspecting timeline by checks notes whistleblower Chelsea Manning? Why on Madoka's green earth...
So, this is a decentralized, anonymous internet... Project? Infrastructure? Thing? But the main goal of it is to be a token, seeing how they cannot help but talk about exchanges taking Nym tokens, or how A16Z's crypto investment arm (that is known to toe the line on what is considered a pump and dump) is putting even more money into them. But, their Twitter page is capital p Professional™️. No RTs about whitelists, no giveaways, lots of articles about their Innovative Technologies and all that.
And once you go into the hidden replies that all melts away, it's bots still, spamming coin symbols, begging for stuff to go to the moon. You can't magically un-scammify this space. No amount of professionalism will get you away from the people using the system as it was meant to be used, which is to convince someone else to be the bigger fool.
