Michael Caine’s character John Cutter in The Prestige is an illusionist who is more experienced than others. He knows the best way to make a magic sausage.
There are always three elements to a great magic trick. This is akin to LIBRA – the colossal failure of a memecoin that was originally endorsed Javier Milei, a renegade Argentinean president.
- “The Pledge” This involves the magician showing an audience something normal, like a set of cards or, in the case for crypto, a Solana memcoin.
- “The Turn” sees the magician take that ordinary thing and make it do something extraordinary — like disappear (in LIBRA’s case, pump to a $4.5 billion market cap).
- “The Prestige” It involves returning an object from the ether in order to finish the illusion. “Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back.”
LIBRA has reached stage three. LIBRA has not recovered from its spectacular 97% crash after doing 20x during the first half hour, with Milei’s support.
Bubblemaps tracked that project insiders had dumped up to $87,000,000 worth of LIBRA. Milei was forced to dissociate himself from the project, and ordered an investigation.
Instead of illusion ingénieur John Cutter spilling the beans on magic, we have memecoin fixer Hayden Davis, also known as Kelsier, telling us exactly what occurs behind the curtain.
In an interview with Coffeezilla, Davis described himself as “the” “launch strategist” For LIBRA, MELANIA, and other. He now fears for his safety.
Davis stated that in order to launch a memecoin, one must battle against forces unknown, which no one has yet figured out how they can defeat. These are onchain snipers. They will buy up memecoins as soon as the mood strikes, and then sell them to anyone else who bought into their pump, killing most projects in the process.
Which is why Davis opted to snipe LIBRA and MELANIA first — max bidding tokens on the way up and unloading them on the way down, with the supposed intention to rebuy the token once again after the initial wave of external snipers had unloaded their clips.
“Every single time, the snipers walk away with $80 million, $100 million, $200 million, and they just disappear. Meanwhile, the project gets blamed, and so do I,” Davis tells Coffeezilla.
“So do I think that sniping is the most ethical thing in the world? No. But do I think that anyone has figured out a better way to deal with it? Also no. If anyone has a better solution, I’d love to hear it. But nobody has given me one.”
It all makes fertile ground for an insider cabal to profit in secret, while the general public — albeit cognizant that they’re gambling in an onchain casino — is largely unaware of the rules of the game.
If Davis were Michael Caine in the crypto-version of The Prestige he would tell us that LIBRA’s third act would be to give it some usefulness, making it magically transform from an empty memecoin. “SocialFi” Offerings with intrinsic value
“Like, imagine if you had big influencers, big figures like Dave (Portnoy) getting involved, and these tokens started cross-promoting each other, burning tokens, adding utility,” Davis said. “Then maybe there’s an actual chance that these projects could become part of a real SocialFi ecosystem.”
Davis said that Dave Portnoy had actually lost five million dollars by trading LIBRA. Davis refunded this amount to Dave Portnoy directly shortly afterwards.
Davis says that he is holding on to the capital he has extracted as leverage until the investigations are completed.
Perhaps stranger things have happened, but maintaining the illusion of an impending climactic third act goes one step further than Sam Bankman-Fried did in his now-historic interview with Money Stuff’s Matt Levine in April 2022 — about eight months before his arrest.
Bankman-Fried had described yield farming tokens in matter-of-fact terms — black boxes that do “literally nothing” They were disguised as a “life-changing, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever.”
As more money was put into these completely useless boxes the token values increased, allowing early participants to make a massive profit from newer competitors. Levine then summarized Bankman Fried’s argument as follows: “I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.”
The Prestige ends in a dramatic way with details of the extremes two magicians had to go to to keep their illusions. “disappearing man” A wife who chose to kill herself rather than continue living in the illusion of her husband duping her and his twin brother.
If crypto can’t move on from these types of predatory token launches, then its future could end up even gorier — tight regulation of memecoin launchpads by way of a US government agency. Yeuch.
We’re crossing our fingers that Davis’ interview of Coffeezilla could be the deathknell to these memecoins in much the same way as the Bankman and Fried chat put an end to farming with high emissions yields.
It’s not clear that crypto is willing to be deceived any more.
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