The effect on the price isn’t very clear: the chart doesn’t really show an upward slope, and trading volume is fairly stable over the period.
More broadly, the $37M of marketing doesn’t seem to have had much impact, and it isn’t hard to see why. Polkadot spent its budget like a traditional company when its product is anything but, while relying on influ-bullshitters, presumably busy churning out the predictions and analyses they are paid for.
Except that Polkadot has been going round in circles for a long time, doesn’t keep its promises, and its upside remains far below that of the small caps beloved of the mugs who think they’ll be billionaires within a fortnight (they’d do well to read Caroline Jurado, she knows).
A project like this should have tried to win over builders so that usage supports the price, rather than hoping for the reverse.
But more broadly, it’s a hell of an answer to the dimwits who scream DYOR6 right after giving investment advice while insisting it isn’t investment advice. That crypto maxim is bullshit.
When you look into a project or a piece of news, you NEVER read the primary source. Because reading a press release, a scientific paper or a white paper is boring, technical and often impossible to verify. That’s why most people settle for secondary sources: media, influencers, and the like.
The problem is that in crypto, ads and supposedly objective, rational opinions are all mixed together. And when you DYOR, those are precisely what you land on.
If you had DYOR’d DOT in May-June, you would have seen a certain buzz around AI and RWA, backed by well-known names. So you would have concluded that the signals were rather positive. When it was all fake.
And it isn’t just a US thing. A few days ago, Hugo Penazzo (who has since blocked me, after deleting his post) was whining about being banned from Instagram (just like Caroline Jurado). He explained that he had lost a major acquisition channel “just” for talking about crypto. Conveniently forgetting that he promotes himself with videos like “gagner 8200$ en 7 jours” [earn $8,200 in 7 days], while posting affiliate links (not always disclosed) to a platform on the blacklist of the AMF, France’s financial markets regulator, without ever mentioning the risks. Same story for Caroline Jurado, whose case I have raised several times.
But that same Penazzo posted a TikTok video a few weeks ago in which he explains how to launder money and dodge tax. Granted, the method is even more stupid than it is illegal, but it should make you think about how fake the independence of all this advice and research really is. And, more broadly, about the ecosystem’s role in anointing (or knighting, which sounds classier) this kind of creator.
The one consolation: almost no French company seems to work with these people. And certainly no PSAN, France’s registered crypto-asset service providers.
As the saying goes, “Small mercies”.
My name is Benjamin Charles, and I advise companies in finance, real estate and web3 on branding, positioning and content creation.
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