Why Influencer Culture is Bad for Crypto in the Long Run

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Influencer culture is slowly creeping into the crypto space and it's becoming a plague. We've seen several "crypto influencers" talk about a certain project and then all of a sudden, we begin to see absolutely crazy pumps.

Infact a lot of people will only invest in a project if a certain influencer says its okay to do so, even if the projects is obviously shit. I've had people shill tokens to me and I'll be like "what's the project about?" and then they're like "I don't really understand the project sha, but Samuel L. Jackson just tweeted about it, so it's going to pump soon, you should buy it!

Origins

I'll take you back to the origin of Influencer culture in Crypto and I hope I can make you see why it shouldn't be the right thing to look at when doing analysis and also why it's bad for the Industry.

In the ancient days, before you could launch a project, you needed to at least have the backing of some major financiers. You couldn't just wake up and say you wanted to create a Token and create it.

Before the launch of Ethereum, if you were going to create your own coin, it meant you would have to create your own blockchain and development cost is not your mate. Also you would need to list your token on a major exchange because DEXs or AMMs were not in Existence then (even when they came into existence, uniswap was not really taken seriously until v2 was released).

The few crypto exchanges that existed then, would charge you for listing and you would also provide initial liquidity for your coin. This fees were usually ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions (liquidity inclusive). So as a project developer, having financial backing was very important.

Most developers relied on VCs and Angel Investors to bootstrap their projects and in order to get them to invest in your project, you had to convince them that what you are building is worth their money. I don't see anyone walking into a pitch meeting with "to the moon".

For example, Vitalik Buterin, the Founder of Ethereum Foundation had been talking about Ethereum and what he was planning to do for over two years before the first Whitepaper was even released, it took another two years for The First Launch of the Ethereum blockchain to happen. During this period, a lot of talking and sourcing for fund was done.

Everybody in the community at the time could perfectly understand what Ethereum was if they wanted to. We didn't need Elon Musk to talk about it for people to use it, we didn't need to create an Ethereum Army to troll people who didn't like the idea.

Another Good example is Uniswap. What many don't know is that Uniswap had been in existence since 2017. Imagine, a tool that could let you trade crypto without unnecessary sign-ups and KYC. Sweet right? But people really did not take them seriously until DeFi became a thing.

Personally I used to think that only Mediocre coins got listed on uniswap (which was kinda true as at the time I discovered uniswap). But hey, what do I know, seems like Mediocrity won eventually.
Now that you know how things were done in the beninging, we would look at what lead to the rise of Influencer culture in crypto.

The Rise of the Influencers

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Before the DeFi Summer boom of 2020, a lot of Crypto Celebrity OGs you know now did not really care about crypto. In fact some of your favorite crypto YouTubers where doing Prank videos and Gold-digger challenge by this time last year.

A few influential people started talking about crypto and then boom! Everyone became interested.
Project owners saw this as something that could be exploited in their own smaller communities (cults), afterall if it worked for the general market, making it work for a group of 20,000 people shouldn't be that difficult.

A whooping 98% of projects that were born in this era have absolutely no use case whatsoever but rely on the help of influencers and their stupid community members to make them succeed. It was goodbye to years of planning and brainstorming for the next big idea. A new memo had been sent out to the streets and it read thus:

Just come up with a token name that's related to food or an animal or safety or something totally meaningless, tell everyone it's going to change the world, tell them you are taking them to them moon (even though, they have never seen your face before), assure them that their funds are safe. They need to feel comfortable buying into your project.

By all means don't mention that there are risks involved because that would be referred to as FUD. Burn a reasonable amount of the total supply (preferably 50%) for no reason. List on Pancakeswap or Uniswap and make sure you have enough money to pay Messi, Kanye West and Taribo West to tweet about your token.

As the price increases sell some more, pay more influencers. You could even offer them some of your tokens to make them more vested in it. Also don't forget to tell your holders to shill because if they don't, you won't get to the moon on schedule. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. No innovations, nothing unique. But you're definitely going to change the world.

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As you can already tell, only projects that have nothing to offer rely on influencers support to keep going.

I'm not against celebrities talking about projects that they are invested in, but from what we've seen over time, these tokens always go down almost immediately after people buy in.

On the long run, no wise person would trust these influencer tweets anymore. Infact it has started happening already.
Personally if I'm invested in any token and I see Kim Kardashian talking about it on instagram, I'm going to sell off immediately because I know that it's either she's been paid to do it or she wants to pump her bags or maybe both.

Go for projects that have value to offer, because even if they end up paying promoters or influencers, the influencers will only be helping people see the value in the project, but you see all these "to the moon" tokens even if you pay God to tweet about it. It will still end in tears because in the end there's not value offered neither is there any problem solved.