The $FEW token ‘experiment’ has backfired, with the DeFi community turning on the group of influencers behind it. 

Inspired by the success of MEME, the FEW token was cooked up by Idea Markets’ co-founder Sam Ratnaker. After setting up a Telegram group for the project on 22 September, he invited a bunch of well-known influencers, including EthHub’s Anthony Sassano, Twitter user ‘DeFi Dude’, and Rocket NFT’s Alex Masmej. 

It started when I invited a few people to join an experiment.

Get some of the industry’s smartest people together, equally distribute tokens and see what happens.

The telegram chat was called “The Experiment”. pic.twitter.com/37sWGATQ6j

— Sam Ratnakar 💡🍍 (@mrdotboson) September 22, 2020

Ratnaker promised the first 50 holders of FEW would each be airdropped 769.23 tokens, vested for 1 year, and described the project as “an experiment to create value for the ecosystem.”

Things started to go wrong very quickly though, as within an hour the group had gone from under 100 people to almost 600, as people eager not to miss out on the next MEME opportunity rushed to get the airdropped tokens. It got even worse when someone quickly set up a “fake” FEW token, adding more confusion to the mess. 

With so many people involved, messages from the chats soon started to leak, and appeared to suggest the project was launched from the outset with the intention of dumping on naive investors.

Needless to say, the backlash has been fierce, despite the group now claiming the whole thing was just a ‘joke’ that’s been taken the wrong way. 

This is disappointing to see from people I know & trust. While some would’ve been doing it as a laugh, others were malicious & looking to profit whether they’ll admit it or not.

Actions of the few, can have repercussions for the many.$FEW – Forget everyone winning… 😕 pic.twitter.com/N2yXHUShaC

— Alex Saunders 🇦🇺👨‍🔬 (@AlexSaundersAU) September 22, 2020

As people began to suspect FEW was simply an attempt by the founding group to create a “pump and dump”, the project crashed in real-time, and many group members scrambled to prove their innocence by burning their FEW tokens. 

AYO.NEWS says:

Despite the huge potential of DeFi, and the many perfectly legitimate projects out there, it’s clear there’s a rapidly snowballing problem with unaudited and forked DeFi protocols that is creating a real ‘Wild West’ climate, and poses the threat of severely damaging the whole industry’s reputation in the eyes of the public and, critically, regulators.

So, whether those behind FEW were just having a laugh, or really did plan on scamming people, is pretty much irrelevant – at the end of the day, they have added to the confusion and mistrust that is hindering the progress of DeFi. 

Earlier this month, we reported on how DeFi project Hotdog crashed and burned within hours of launching, at one point dropping from $4K to $1 in under 5 minutes. 

‘AYO.NEWS says’ features the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pentagon Digital Limited or its affiliates or associates. 

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