Our in-depth research on Chainlink exposed the technical limitations of the network, its centralized architecture and prohibitively high costs that heavily curtail commercial applications.
In a previous post, we examined how Chainlink uses grossly exaggerated, even fake "partnerships" to camouflage its deeply flawed fundamentals and to create a sense of legitimacy.
This would hardly be possible without their faithful to death supporters who make heavy noise around every new announcement, a.k.a PR stunt with no follow through and traction.
Besides playing cheerleaders, the LINK Marines are utilized to attack in swarms when the community feels threatened. Their true face was revealed shortly after we published our report. Instead of addressing the well-formulated points of concern that we raised, the troll task force was quickly mobilized to discredit Zeus Capital in an attempt to shift the focus away from the exposed problems. A world-old, cheap tactic used to avoid answering tough questions. To this date, Chainlink has not come forward with any official counter-arguments. We understand their struggle, as it is quite hard to "debunk" findings supported by tons of publicly available data and even previous "partners" coming forward to show that Chainlink is an empty shell.
In this article, we do the dirty work of uncovering how the Link Marines operate through lies and propaganda to keep the Chainlink price bubble inflating.
A Puppet Community
But who are the Link Marines? At the core, there is a self-proclaimed leader group of paid trolls tasked to fabricate a sense of large and engaged community, with the ultimate goal of misleading unsophisticated retail investors into buying more LINK. These puppet "followers" create a smokescreen of hype by constantly spamming multiple distribution channels, including Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and the infamous 4chan message boards, arguably the birthplace of Chainlink.
The Link Marines are gunpowder for the fictitious partnership fireworks and a driving force of the Russian pump-and-dump machine. Their accounts are connected, all their comments sound the same, their profile pictures are alike. This is a paid XRPArmy on opioids. They have even come up with a ranking, which, of course, is not based on any meaningful contribution to the community, but solely on the amount of LINK held. Naturally, the supreme leader of Chainlink is "5 Star General" Sergey Nazarov. It hardly gets any more ridiculous than that.
Nonetheless, the army analogy can serve well for explaining how the Link Marines operate. At a more basic level, the ranking exploits the human need to belong and be accepted in a closed community and effectively encourages new "recruits" to accumulate more of the useless LINK and fund "general" Sergey’s taste for yachts and expensive condos. Upon command, the puppets are called to arms and attack anyone who threatens the financial wellbeing of the Chainlink founders by exposing their scam scheme.
Army of Sheep
The herd instinct is carefully nurtured throughout the Chainlink community. Lines between the self and the group are blurred in order to discourage independent thinking and create a brainwashed mob that obediently follows the orders of "general" Sergey. The true Link Marines heavily resist opinions that deviate from the "universal truth": Chainlink is the future. Buy Link or stay poor. I am never selling. The result is a loyal army of sheep led by a wolf.
JunkoSuzuki, a "champion" of the Chainlink community, establishes the code of conduct: Don’t Read, Never Sell.
Blissful ignorance and denial are strongly promoted as a primary reaction when the utility or the unsustainably high price of LINK are called into question.
All criticism of Chainlink, supported by data or not, is immediately cast as FUD designed to rob the LINK holders from their bright future.
The true Link Marine should be concerned with nothing else but Chainlink, Sergey and Big Macs.
We can see from the next tweet, where eating Big Macs and holding LINK should lead to. In reality, however, there could be just one possible end for holding LINK long term - financial ruin.
Beyond the comical and infantile "DR;NS" (Didn’t Read, Never Selling), lies something more disturbing though. The paid "missioners" of Chainlink are building a cult of personality, representing Sergy Nazarov as a god, promising richness to the most faithful followers who keep "stacking" LINK no matter what.
Similarly to the totalitarian regimes, this is made possible by employing various propaganda techniques, especially Big Lie, which was coined by Adolf Hitler to describe a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Remember all those fake partnerships, including Google and friends?
The religious zeal is gradually but firmly established throughout the Chainlink community.
Successful projects are driven by a strong and diverse community, not frog memes and blind believers resembling a sect. Any person with self-respect and a basic level of critical thinking would disassociate from this.
Seek and Destroy
Chainlink is not a stranger to criticism, often coming from well-known names in the industry. Here are just a handful of examples to give you a perspective:
- Charlie Lee (819.8K followers) grossly disregarded Chainlink for not being anything of importance.
- Tone Vays (206.1K followers) called it "Just another shitcoin of the month".
- Nic Carter (54K followers) denounced Chainlink as a "pump and dump" scheme designed to turn a few 4channers into billionaires.
- Ryan Selkis (97.1K) used Chainlink as an example that skyrocketing prices can happen even with non-existent "crypto fundamentals".
- Zack Hess described Chainlink as expensive and unsecure.
- Trader Monk (1.4K followers) highlighted how absurd it is that "a bunch of sweaty nerds sharing frog memes on the internet", i.e. the Link Marines, are able to sustain the cosmically high price by playing wanna-be investors.
How do the LINK Marines react to these "threats"?
A true war story. They mobilize almost immediately both to glorify their favorite cryptocurrency and to defend it when someone brave enough questions the legitimacy of this Russian pump-and-dump scheme. The Marines leave near-zero room for people to speak negatively of Chainlink, its native token or "General" Nazarov, without going unpunished. Acting like an authoritarian militia, the cumulative effect of their cheap tactics, should not be neglected.
The very moment a member of the LINK Marines spots a Twitter post, a video, an article or anything that "demeans" Chainlink in one way or another, the alarm is raised immediately by pinging the rest with #Chainlink, #Linkmarines and $LINK. The feral troops are simply waiting for a signal. An attack, resembling a hungry flock of vultures descending towards a small hunk of meat, is immediately initiated.
Every point raised against Chainlink is buried by an onslaught of hateful replies and Frog memes, which, similarly to letters written in blood, are left under every enemy social media post. Pepe the Frog is a trademark of the community, which originated as an innocent cartoon character in 2005, but then turned into an icon for racist and antisemitic movements after being appropriated by the extreme right group called the alt-right. The Anti Defamation League (ADL), a leading anti-hate organization, added the cartoon to their database, placing it alongside the Blood Drop Cross of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi’s Swastika. The hate symbol manifests itself in the heavily disproportionate hostility coming from the LINK ranks. At the same time, LINK devotees are not strangers to Nazi ideograms, which, surprisingly or not, are quite popular among 4chan kids. This vile, extreme-right part of the community is slowly but surely destroying Chainlink’s anyway shaken reputation - a phenomenon that wiser or if you want grown-up members also notice.
Reading through the 4chan comments, it feels that the main purpose of LINK is not to be used as an unit of exchange between node operators and network users but a funding tool for far-right movement and ideologies.
Furthermore, it seems that a good portion of the Chainlink "investors" are underaged. Here is a kid promoting the LINK token:
Here are some more examples:
This is a well-known scenario that simply repeated itself after we published our research on Chainlink and its fraudulent activities.
Considering how Chainlink consistently uses market manipulation to support the utterly inflated LINK price, we find the threats for legal action quite ironic and amusing. JunkoSuzuki even takes it a step further and intentionally spreads fake information about SEC investigation, which of course, never took place.
We were accused of impersonating a UK consultancy company which was never the case, as we are neither the first nor the last company to use "Zeus" in its name. Examples include the Czech-based equity management, the consulting and financial planning company Zeus Capital SA, the open-ended investment company Zeus Capital Sivac, the London-based investment banking boutique Zeus Capital Limited and the Canadian boutique corporate finance firm Zeus Capital LTD.
It seems that the Link Marines ran out of imagination as they even started to impersonate us through their personal accounts:
Then a made-up story of a user called "Simeon"/Georgi Dimitrov, allegedly involved in similar "scams" before, tried to draw connections between us and Nexo.
All of this was designed to shift the focus away from responding to the disturbing issues that we unearthed.
4Chan
Recently described as "99% trolling and 1% gold", the anonymous messaging board 4chan, is quite a controversial topic. Ridiculously enough, this altar of ignorance is slowly but surely turning into the wheel behind the crypto industry. Moreover, it’s known that having a highly active 4chan community translates into a better token performance.
Chainlink is not an exception and is even considered a byproduct of 4chan users who tirelessly spammed the message boards about Chainlink.
This vigorous activity taking place in a troll breeding ground like 4chan led some to believe that Chainlink was a joke, much like DogeCoin. Far from being funny now, the joke is currently valued at $3.8 billion, creating a massively inflated Ponzi scheme that rests upon PR stunts, market manipulation and a toxic community.
A search result by keywords reveals that Chainlink is still very popular among 4chaners with a total of 11,834 comments, slightly behind Bitcoin, which is a synonym for crypto for the average person around the world. Having Chainlink right next to Bitcoin in terms of search results on 4chan shows how absurdly biased this platform is.
Data as of July 30, 2020, Source: 4chan
This fits quite well with the publicly known information that 4channers hold significant amounts of LINK.
The Coordinated Pump
Our persistent efforts to expose the deeply fraudulent nature of this Ponzi scheme have created significant downward pressure on LINK’s price, interrupting the inflating bubble. In order to sustain the falling price and divert the attention from our findings, Chainlink released a barrage of new “partnerships” and ordered a mobilized troll attack. This cheap tactic showed only temporary results and when the whole market plummeted on 2nd of August, the Link Marines reached a new low by distorting the market with an orchestrated price pumping.
So it turns out it wasn’t Zeus Capital who manipulated the market. Remember that we have diligently disclosed our short LINK position right from the beginning and have presented fact based arguments. Neither Chainlink nor its community ever tried to refute our findings. Instead, they turned hostile and started to openly orchestrate coordinated pumps. We let you decide who the bad actor actually is and whose activities are illegal.
Conclusion
These toxic actors are here to create a false sense of community by hyping up fake partnerships to lure people into buying a worthless token. Unfortunately for them, by replacing logic and argument with hate and aggression, the Link Marines defeat the purpose of their existence by further eroding the legitimacy of the Chainlink house of cards, destined to fail very soon.
We are here to accelerate this process and protect uninformed investors from massive losses by exposing the true face of the deeply flawed Russian scam scheme called Chainlink.
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