The story of how this Twitter influencer has changed from a community darling to a spurned by thousands of people.
Written by: Anthony Sassano, founder of The Daily Gwei, co-founder of EthHub
Once the popular yEarn / YFI number one fan and the well-known Twitter account Blue Kirby, he directed and performed an ” exit scam ” (exit scam) just three months after its launch. It seems that the Ethereum community still feels the aftershocks of this event. If you don’t know much about it, this article can help you understand the story.
The plot is wonderful, please enjoy it.
Source: https://twitter.com/CL207/status/1314828002857873414
Act 1: The rise of a new star
The Twitter account Blue Kirby seems to be a hit overnight: after the accidental launch of the governance token YFI three months ago, the popularity of the yEarn protocol has greatly increased. Blue Kirby Twitter account the number of fans increased from 0 nearly twenty thousand people, has become a popular Ethernet Square community members.
Any tweet he sends will get crazy interactions (usually YFI touted posts).
Blue Kirby approach is typical of the red route network – itself with something (yEarn / YFI) has crazy potential bundling, and jumped on the cusp of its own. Blue Kirby means is not limited to tweet, but also through education, marketing and community management, contribution to real value for yEarn ecosystem budding. This makes the Blue Kirby became yEarn minority communities (short) who receive remuneration, these jobs every month so that he received about $ 7,000. In addition, yEarn founder Andre Cronje also donated 25 YFIs (equivalent to 400,000 US dollars at the price at the time of writing) for his contributions.
Kirby is the creation and dissemination of expert networks red stems, personally promoted the “few understand” or “few” net red stems and “oh my” network Red Terrier, became popular in the Ethernet Square community.
However, these net celebrities gradually annoyed the community and were eventually cleaned up.
Act Two: Honeymoon Period
Kirby, riding the east wind of YFI’s soaring price, seems unstoppable. Their tweets are full of the contents of YFI, and because the price of YFI skyrocketed, all coin holders became rich.
Kirby started selling NFTs on the Rarible platform with the help of his reputation, and successfully became one of the top NFT sellers on the platform. There are two main reasons for this: First, they have a large audience and can often promote their NFT through tweets. Secondly, their NFTs are like yEarn founders Andre and Blue Kirby. Just like when ” Star Wars 7 ” is about to be released, Disney sells its surroundings.
According to statistics from Rarible, Blue Kirby has made 500 ETH from selling NFTs in the past 30 days, which is equivalent to about US$186,000. It’s not bad to earn so much in one month?
As of this time, Kirby seems to be an unstoppable powerful force, because YFI prices have been rising, and Kirby’s success has been tied to it. Their NFTs are selling crazy, and the higher the YFI rises, the richer they are and the crazier their Twitter interactions. Kirby might have the intoxication of reaching the top of the world.
Then the music stopped abruptly, the price of YFI began to fall, and the old tradition of the currency circle repeated itself again, and people tried to grab a chair before losing money. But Kirby decided to do is cut the legs of the chair, Duolu out of the room.
Act Three: Falling from the Throne
With the decline in YFI prices, we have seen a perfect reflection of the latter part of the market cycle. But in fact, there was no fundamental change in the fundamentals of the yEarn project during this period. The team still create innovative products, the introduction of new revenue farming strategies to promote the growth of the total value of the lock and so on.
The founder Andre deployed a new project called ” Eminence ” from the yEarn deployer address at this time, which became Kirby’s Waterloo. The project has not been activated: no interactive interface UI, there is no guidance on how to participate, without any explanation of the specific content of only one Twitter account referred to the project and one token, you can use a smart contract to purchase the token or It is exchanged for other tokens.
Although everything is vague, it still can’t stop Kirby from screaming hard to blow any products related to yEarn to the sky. Kirby was a wave of tweets fierce winds, manufacturing Do not miss the opportunity to get on the panic, people buy to sell this link EMN tokens, but they were fully aware of just making Andre ‘production stage test “, these contracts are not smart It is too likely to have been audited and not ready to interact with users.
So sure enough, Eminence intelligent lightning attacks contract was overturned, just a few hours before they stole $ 15 million. The hacker eventually returned 8 million U.S. dollars (sent to YFI) and then returned it to the person who purchased the EMN, but the loss has actually been caused.
It is worth mentioning that Andre briefly quit Twitter and social media after the car rolled over.
After this hacking attack, Kirby seemed to want to repeat the trick-using this accident to create an Internet celebrity explosion. They launched the hashtag #HalfRekt , which means that people only lost 50% (or half) of their assets in this rollover accident.
Perhaps when YFI prices continue to rise, this stalk will become popular, but the situation at that time was that YFI prices were declining all the way, and many coin holders who stood guard at high positions did not lose only half, but lost their money. #FullRekt , and it is The same group of people bought EMN.
Kirby therefore fell down from the previous unbreakable opinion leaders throne.
Act Four: Betrayal
Therefore, after being attacked by Eminence, Kirby defeated the goodwill in the community, and they did their best to hope to restore the original influence. Unfortunately for them, the general environment is that the price of YFI has fallen rapidly, and the community has ” lost more than half ” due to the purchase of EMN (many of them are caught by Kirby’s advocacy). Most importantly, Kirby publicly sold their YFI for approximately $22,000 (you can see the relevant information on the bluekirby.eth address), and they explained that doing so was to wash their ETH through Tornado Cash and transfer the funds Into a more private account (they did that later).
However, the community does not buy this explanation, because it is much easier for Kirby to use a centralized exchange to “launder” their assets. Therefore, the community regards Kirby’s sale of his YFI as a serious betrayal.
Soon thereafter, Kirby began to vigorously promote a new project they participated in called Off-Blue , which originally came with a brand new token. No one really knows the content of the project or intend to do, but since Kirby involved is the new wave of hype, people think it has a certain relationship with yEarn / YFI.
Over time, more information about the Off-Blue project surfaced. They claimed that the project was created by Kirby + some “anonymous people” and was related to NFT . The details of the token distribution reflect this, and people can share most tokens by purchasing the NFT created by Blue Kirby and the NFT created by Off-Blue itself. The token distribution also includes an airdrop, and the recipient of the airdrop needs to use the address that interacts with YFI governance, which further proves the theory of the project ” related to yEarn “.
Source: https://rekt.ghost.io/whale-hunt-sbf-blue-kirby/ , also a good article about the story of Blue Kirby
Within a few days, the Off-Blue account sold about 2,000 ETH ($746,000) of NFTs, and did not clearly state the purpose of the money-people speculated that all of this money would go to Blue Kirby (here is some evidence ). As many people complained that Off-Blue was a scam or a fraudulent project, Rarible decided to suspend Off-Blue’s account on its platform.
Fortunately, Off-Blue is offering refunds (may be here) to persons using ETH purchase NFT, but apparently the damage was done, the project can only shut up shop (at least for now).
Act 5: Disappearance and adverse effects
During this period of time, Blue Kirby was still dealing with the adverse effects of the Eminence rollover accident. The price of YFI was still falling. They sold its YFI to deal with the Off-Blue mess, and someone broke the news about the true identity of Blue Kirby and carried out actions on it. Human flesh search .
All this caused Blue Kirby to delete their Twitter account and actually disappeared from the public’s sight. They sold YFI and kept the ETH they got from the original sales of NFT and Off-Blue related sales, and it is estimated that they made a total of One million dollars .
The consequences of this farce are very tragic. After the disappearance of Blue Kirby, many people in the community are now more annoyed by ” Anonymous Builders “, because although Blue Kirby is famous, for most people, it has nothing to do with any real-life identity , Their presence means that there is no real sense of personal presence in the game. Ironically, when they did have a sense of presence in the game (after being fleshed), they decided to completely withdraw from the community.
Will Blue Kirby have a redemption action? Will they return to the community with a new mental outlook to make up for all their wrongdoing? Will they refund the money earned? I highly doubt it. Some things may be remedied, but this does not seem to be one of them.
Even Blue Kirby committed an honest mistake, even if they have been out of good will, they may also have been hurt too many people and too many have lost the trust of the community and therefore can not be welcomed with open arms.
Now, Blue Kirby has disappeared in the ether.
