Quick take:
- ETH_Ben (his pseudonymous Twitter handle) raised $6.9 million in 72 hours.
- Before then, he was a relatively unknown NFT influencer.
- Wale Swoosh documents the entire timeline of events uncovering one of the crypto industry’s latest mysteries.
The meme coin buzz has been raging on recently with Milady and PEPE headlining the recent rally. As such, it was inevitable that a few degens were going to take advantage of the latest market buzz.
One such individual that benefitted from this frenzy is the pseudonymous ETH_Ben, who went from being a small NFT influencer to raising $6.9 million in 72 hours.
On-chain researcher Wale.Swoosh dived in to uncover the tale-tape of Ben’s activity leading to his massive windfall.
According to Wale, Ben has been actively involved in the NFT space for about two years now. He bought his first NFT an artwork by Ola Volo: “Siren of Glass” in May 2021. Since then, he has gone on to be a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Moonbirds.
His involvement in the latter did not end well, based on a tweet he posted on March 25, 2023.
Although Ben has been tweeting about various NFT projects on-and-off, Wale.Swoosh reckons, who referenced statistics from popular NFT influencer analytics platform NFTinspect reckons he was never seen as a big voice.
However, it is obvious that something has changed over the past few days, looking at the trajectories of the two curves.
Being unpopular did not stop Ben from swooping in when the opportunity presented itself.
Amid the meme coin buzz driven by $PEPE and Milady coin, the relatively unknown NFT influencer decided to launch his own meme coin, $BEN.
He started off by drumming support for $PEPE on Twitter. Tweeting in CAPS, Ben optimistically backed PEPE to flip Shiba Inu and Dogecoin tokens in the meme coin charts. And because PEPE was already a popular meme coin, it helped with engagement, which of course attracted more eyeballs to his timeline.
Wale.Swoosh believes the high engagement in his tweets is what inspired Ben to launch $BEN, with the presale raising 55 ETH from 329 wallets. That’s roughly $100,000, so his big break had not arrived yet.
However, on May 8th $BEN caught the attention of one crypto influencer BitBoy_Crypto, whose tweet about the meme coin “added relevance”.
And as of May 9th, BitBoy had already joined the $BEN coin team, adding that a third member was soon to join the new team of two.
Little did BitBoy know that Ben had other plans. After 72 hours, the team of two was back to a team of one, this time Ben handing the $BEN project to BitBoy.
A few hours later, Ben announced his new project $PSYOP, with the pre-sale also launching the same day. The project raised more than $1 million within an hour and a total of $6.9 million by the end of the presale.
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