We have seen bulls and bears, as well as storms, which is why we know that maintaining our original intention is really not easy.

Well, today the market is so bad, and I see various experts analyzing data/market sentiment/community heat, etc. As someone who has experienced 94 and 319, I would like to share a joke I encountered recently at work and some industry thoughts (consider it a tribute to the past).

PundiAI is currently undergoing brand/mainnet upgrades and token swaps, so we have been in contact with exchanges. We have built from 2017 to today, and these standard processes are quite clear. Aside from the corresponding compliance procedures and code audits, what remains is the market budget, how many new users/traffic it can bring, and how to ensure existing users can benefit, etc. The project party needs liquidity and new trading venues; exchanges need users and trading volume, which is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

The interesting part is that after simple business communication, it comes to the research department's evaluation phase. They raised several points that could lead to rejecting our listing or requiring an increased budget due to certain conditions not being met. I’ll mention a few interesting ones:

First, they said our data and heat are insufficient, specifically pointing out our lack of social media data and on-chain data, and they provided several examples of similar projects in the same track. I was puzzled; you are all in the research department, studying projects every day, can’t you tell the authenticity and truthfulness of the data? Come on, an account with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers has only a few thousand views on its tweets and fewer than 10 comments—are you telling me that’s real? And on-chain data consists of multiple transaction records within a single transaction hash; are the retail investors of this project all experts? Can everyone just do their own RPC interface for packaged transactions? This is clearly unreasonable, right? Especially since professional AI data labeling itself has a threshold; it’s unlikely that a large number of labelers would label the same set of data simultaneously, especially since the subsequent data verification and cleaning costs are higher than the labeling itself, making it even less likely unless you simply don’t care about costs or your purpose is not for the data itself.

Second, there’s the endorsement from investment institutions. Most projects going public now (except for memes) need the backing of major VCs. But as an old project, from FunctionX in 2019 to PundiAI today, we have been building with our own money for over six years and have never taken a penny from outside. From our perspective as “old-timers,” isn’t this a good thing? Purely community-driven, without VC control, and emotionally, it’s a very “sentimental” thing, right? Yet in the eyes of the research department, this has become synonymous with lacking formal institutional endorsement, being “not legit,” and having no heat. I don’t even know how to respond to this…

Third, there’s the token circulation and valuation. From 2019 to now, all tokens have been unlocked, and our market cap equals the fully diluted valuation, with nearly 70% of tokens locked in validator nodes. Then the big shots in the research department said there’s a lot of selling pressure. I was puzzled; first, not to mention that most of the tokens are in validator nodes, we are purely community-driven—who would sell? Secondly, our old tokens have been listed on major exchanges before; after six years of ups and downs, would we still need to sell at your place? Furthermore, the selling pressure is proportional to the market fully diluted valuation; our market cap and fully diluted valuation are less than 150 million. An AI data layer with business, products, customers, and revenue is only worth 150 million—why don’t you look at those projects that have just launched with a fully diluted valuation of 1 billion? Their selling pressure deserves more attention, right? No, their later selling pressure deserves more attention, right?!

There are many more points to complain about, but I won’t list them all. I can understand that the research experts have to look at many projects every day, each with their own viewpoints and data dimensions, and this involves a lot of professional knowledge. However, at the very least, they should be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood, good and evil, right?

I don’t know when it started, but traffic bribery, data bribery/fraud, project skin-swapping (I’ve even heard of founders swapping tokens?), airdrops to studios, etc., have surprisingly become basic operations for projects to go public.

Sometimes I feel that going public, especially for some early tokens, is very similar to venture capital; it’s about investing in the people/team’s fundamental qualities. If going public relies on these tactics to exchanges and VCs, then the future development of these projects is truly concerning.

We have been in this circle for so long, and we have heard of these tricks and tactics. It’s not that we can’t do them, but we are unwilling to do so. Because in the end, these things will only benefit studios, gray industries, and manipulators, at the cost of new retail investors’ money, the focus of builders’ work shifting, and the overall stagnation of the industry. (To say something shameless, the current airdrop tricks are just what we played with back in the day.)

We have seen bulls and bears, as well as storms, which is why we know that maintaining our original intention is really not easy. Sometimes I really miss the friends I met during the ICO boom in 17/18 (many of the bosses I met back then have retired). Back then, the community was poor, but every topic we discussed was about how to improve efficiency/safety, how to push to market, and how to support each other in case of hacks, etc., working together for mutual development. Back then, introducing a VC or an exchange listing opportunity was done without charge (a thousand words omitted here), but now it’s all about various kickbacks/referral fees/management fees.

I really miss the pure us from that time.

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