Who is ben.eth?
If you’re not on Twitter following eth_ben (ben.eth), I suggest you stop reading and do that now. At the time of writing, ben.eth has been taking Twitter over. Search $PYSOP—a perfect name for a meme coin, btw—and you’ll be flooded with a lot of hype and even more bad actors trying to scam you.
Before we move on, the presale for $PSYOP is over. So don’t get scammed by people posing as ben.eth or asking for ETH in return for some $PSYOP. I’d recommend watching everything unfold because we’re already late. Unless you’re a bonafide degenerate that’s going to hit up the DEXs to get your hands on some $PYSOP, I’d suggest staying out of this one. There’s too much uncertainty surrounding this one. You have been warned.
Anyhow, let’s get started.
Who the F— is Ben?
I don’t know. But wale.swoosh has a great piece on ben.eth and explains ben.eth’s history in the crypto space.
Based on wale.swoosh’s thread post, we see that ben.eth started in NFTs around 2021 purchasing “Siren of Glass” by artist, Ola Volo.
Since then he’s been an active member in the NFT community but was not a major influencer in the space, specifically in the BAYC and Moonbirds communities.
His reach was fairly stagnant until recently. Here’s wale.swoosh sharing ben.eth’s global reach metrics over time.
So how did ben.eth rise out of the ashes of an NFT bear market? He milked $PEPE and did it masterfully.
How ben.eth rode the $PEPE wave
$PEPE’s been dominating the crypto scene for the past several weeks. On Twitter, your feed will most likely include the following green frog amongst your regular scheduled content.
So how does ben.eth fit into the $PEPE narrative? Well, according to wale.swoosh, ben.eth started shilling $PEPE. But not just shill a couple of posts to hijack the trending hashtag, he did it nonstop. And did everything in all caps. What’s more is that he changed his persona at this point to be bolder and more degenerate.
All this was to set up $BEN, ben.eth’s token.
$BEN by ben bought by Ben
ben.eth launched $Ben May 5th and raised about 55 ETH. The token did not do that well, but in a the most random fashion crypto influencer Ben Armstrong aka Bitboy_Crypto took interest in the project, joined it, and eventually bought it from ben.eth.
With Armstrong joining the project, $BEN took off and hit a new all-time high. But, it seems as though ben.eth had other plans.
For a project dubbed his “life project”, he parted ways with it fairly quickly. Days prior to ben selling $BEN to Ben, he tweeted this:
After the announcement and successful transfer of the project, ben.eth (brilliantly) hijacked news of the sale to start the pre-sale of $PSYOP.
At this point, with a large following coming off the high that was $BEN, ben.eth took advantage of a captive audience to funnel them into his new project, $PSYOP. The post above and many $PSYOP shills afterwards generated $6.9m USD for ben.eth.
At the time of writing this article, ben.eth hasn’t launched $PSYOP yet. But reports are out that ben.eth has already spent some of the presale money (probably knowing very well, people will be monitoring his wallet activity).
Whether ben.eth launches $PSYOP or not, one thing is clear: this guy has clearly mastered the art of maintaining our attention. Think about it. He cut through the millions of tweets about $PEPE, pushed them onto $BEN, and did $6.9m presale for $PSYOP. All of this in a span of a month.
So what now?
I stand by staying on the sidelines. Too risky and speculative for me. But, I’ll be watching and so should you.
Here’s one for ben.eth tweet before I let you go.
The suspense is real, lol.
