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Atto, Founder of Little Shapes NFT's pseudonym, revealed that the project was in fact a "social experience" designed to shed light on the large-scale nonfungible token network bot scams on Twitter.
Since late December 2022, Little Shapes has been attracting much attention from the media and crypto community. This is due to several semiviral tweets detailing incidents in the life of the founder who seemed too beautiful to be true.
For example, getting out of a five-month coma, discover he had assets locked into FTX, He told his wife and discovered that she was cheating on him along with other industry people.
I had a car accident five months ago and I just woke up from a massive coma. I don't know what has happened since, but we come back stronger than ever.
You’re only on the start, of the Little Shapes journey pic.twitter.com/rOEEHq0kVN
— Little Shapes NFT (BALLZ) (@LittleShapesNFT) December 28, 2022
In a Feb. 2 Twitter thread, however, the Little Shapes NFT account stated to its 30,800 followers: “thanks for participating everyone — Little Shapes was a social experiment by @BALLZNFT” and shared a link to a 158-page document.
“But the exhibition was real. Here’s how a ring of influencers and founders drained $200 million+ out of the ecosystem over 274 projects,” Little Shapes NFT wrote, adding that:
“Over the past year, NFT Twitter has been manipulated and controlled mostly by a singular Twitter botnet. It mostly appeared in February 2022 and then was used together with a network of influencers and alpha groups to sell projects."
It's called "The insider NFT bot network that has been controlling the market behind the scenes."
He alleges that since February 2022, a large number of small-scale DTV projects have deployed robot networks to artificially create media hype and legitimacy, all with the goal of enticing investors.
What would happen is a project would come up seemingly out of nowhere, like @MindblowonNFT or @BBRCOfficial, all these influencers would host collab giveaways on Twitter - they would bot it to shit, you’d see the botted numbers and think the project has hype, you mint.
— Little Shapes NFT (BALLZ) (@LittleShapesNFT) February 1, 2023
Speaking with BuzzFeed News on Feb. 2, Atto, also the founder of BALLZNFT, described Little Shapes as “performance art” and stressed that “people don’t pay attention unless you give them a reason to.”
"I needed a story to sell so that no one would ignore a bad story," he said.
The document indicates the networks of bots, as "dmister", which sell engagement on social media as a key avenue for NFTS projects and only bill around $100 per 1,000 likes, retweets & answers.
Find out why there are 120k answers and 20k likes. It's more profound than robots. It's the same private botnet out of 274 projects in the last year, a botnet that you can't access anywhere publicly, with what appears to be an entire organized cabal behind it. pic.twitter.com/pyH0zliVy0
— Little Shapes NFT (BALLZ) (@LittleShapesNFT) February 1, 2023
In fact, the BALLZNFT team used Dmister to promote Little Shapes NFT as an example of how it works.
Once these projects have successfully built up enough hype to rope in actual investors, they “get rug-pulled or fucked over, usually in the course of a few months, and the people behind the project make $3 or $4 million,” Atto told BuzzFeed, adding that:
“What I found frustrating is we’re in a space ranked completely by social capital and fake Twitter engagement where nothing’s real.”
Little Shapes has been represented in the past as a future avatar-style project with 4444 TNT using a specific software "engine" to allow owners to interact and modify the shape of the associated work of their token in real time.
Related: Nifty News: Bitcoin NFTs cause spicy fees, Mastercard exec tokenizes resignation letter and more
BALLZNFT appears genuine, given that the NFT project had its first mint on Feb. 3 and his symbolic work illustrating references to the collapse of small forms.
BALLZ - the project behind the small forms and the exhibit botnet.
If you want to ensure a spot in our collection, you can support us here:
- refunding all if not minted out within 5 days
- 3 owned = BALLZ airdrop on mint day https://t.co/uI9nfzDRCl
Below /
— BALLZ (@BALLZNFT_) February 3, 2023
