Ben is a master at playing the attention game, but the game must eventually end.
Written by wale.swoosh
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Ben is a newly emerging legend in the crypto world. How did he go from an NFT player with little influence to a community leader who raised $6.9 million in 72 hours?
Ben has been arguably one of the most controversial figures in the crypto Twitter community over the past few days, launching the BEN token, partnering with BitBoy Crypto, and launching one of the largest presales of the current “meme summer.”
Who is Ben?
Ben has been active in the NFT space since May 2021, and the first NFT he purchased was Ola Volo’s work “Siren of Glass”.
Since then, Ben has been an active member of the NFT community, holding BAYC and Moonbirds, but parting ways with them after the CC0 controversy. At that time, he was not yet an influencer.
He occasionally tweets about events in the Web3 space, but his voice is not loud. He has not been involved in any major scandals or controversies.
His influence on Inspect has been negligible for a long time, but that is about to change…
Meme Summer
With the rise of PEPE and the arrival of the memecoin carnival season, Ben changed his usual behavior. He began to tweet frequently and constantly promote memecoin.
This pitch attracts a lot of participants and the PEPE community is very strong. Many other people in the field are doing the same thing, Pepe = engagament, and they pitch hundreds of times a day.
Ben’s story could have ended there, an insignificant influencer turned memecoin shiller, as we’ve seen over the past few weeks.
Issue BEN
Perhaps inspired by PEPE, Ben launched his own memecoin: BEN, which raised 55 ETH from 329 wallets during the presale phase. This was a mediocre result, and BEN did not look very promising, and the token began to trend downward after launch. Ben continued to post more tweets to promote his token, all in capital letters, but to no avail.
Once again, the story could have ended: someone issued a token and the token went to zero.
But things turned around because on May 8th this happened:
BEN subsequently climbed sharply. Bitboy continued to tweet in support of BEN and officially joined the “team” on May 9:
Even though Ben promised BEN was his life’s project, he handed it over to Bitboy less than 72 hours later.
Not only that, but just hours later, Ben announced his new project…
PSYOP Pre-sale
That same day, Ben released the PSYOP pre-sale announcement. From the beginning, he used BEN's success to gain reputation.
In one hour, he raised more than a million dollars. By the end of the presale, a total of $6.9 million had been raised.
He then posted more all-caps tweets, and the huge success of the presale had all of crypto Twitter talking about him. This in turn led to more fomo.
Whatever you think of Ben, he’s a master at the attention game. He bought a Milday using a PSYOP fundraising wallet, and the community freaked out: “He’s using presale funds for personal consumption.”
It seems to me that he could have used other wallets; the fact that he didn’t, may be another ploy to draw attention.
Happy Ending？
The question is, will this story have a happy ending or a complete disaster? I'm leaning towards the latter, there's little to suggest it will work out.
Ben cited BEN’s success as proof of his ability, but BEN’s success may be mainly due to Bitboy’s participation and influence. Ben’s achievement was to get in touch with Bitboy.
The attention game will end, as evidenced by the many precedents of NFTs and memecoins. Attention will shift sooner or later. Ben can buy 10 more Miladies, but the crypto market will forget about him at some point, it always does. The biggest advantage Ben and his presale have is that they are leveraging attention, but this may also be the reason for their ultimate demise.
Regardless, Ben’s story will go down in history. It shows once again that the crypto world is all about attention, and sometimes the dice fall in unexpected ways.