Insider trading, carpet drawing, misinformation in the media are the evils that always lurk in the crypto room. The article will highlight the villains who contributed to the most controversial events of the year.

Crypto villains scandal best in 2021

Where there is money there is greed and shady behavior. So far, it is clear that the crypto space has had a successful year, with assets like Bitcoin, ETH and SOL soaring and total market capitalization surpassing $ 3 trillion for the first time.

But while the market enriches countless investors and traders, there are many who risk anything to increase their profits. One surprise for this year was the inclusion on the list of Previously Notable People, who confirms the view that money can really change everything.

Cryptocurrencies have always had archenemies, perhaps most notably the boomers responsible for overseeing financial regulation in the United States. Including, of course, not only the chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, and his staff. This year is particularly important for the NFT, but it also brings with it the phenomenon of “right-click savers” – angry keyboard heroes who follow political radicalism and unfounded hatred of new technologies. It won’t be possible to list all of the NFT skeptics who rated this trend negatively this year, but other than that, it’s likely that they’ll change their minds once they find it more relevant in years.

Instead, the article names some of the most hated characters in the crypto space this year, as well as the stars of some of the most shocking incidents since January. Here’s a list of the 10 worst characters in the crypto space in 2021.

Su Zhu

Su Zhu is an influential figure in the field, and his appearances on the Uncommon Core podcast are often referred to as “must listen” on the Crypto Briefing Slack channel. Zhu is known for his Yoda-like intellect, but following him on any prediction can be risky as he acts like a killer. In May, he predicts that ETH will hit $ 25,000 Bankless after announcing that Three Arrows Capital, the hedge fund he runs with Kyle Davies, has enough assets to become one of the largest owners in the world.

But in late summer, Su Zhu and Davies announced the lead in a $ 230 million round of funding for Avalanche. They focused on promoting their 400,000 Twitter followers for the Layer 1 chain AVAX coin. When AVAX peaked at $ 140 in late November, Zhu caused a stir by joining the Ethereum and Avalanche controversy with Synthetix’s Kain Warwick on Twitter before claiming that Ethereum’s gas fees drove him .

The reason Su Zhu was included on this list was when he was to explain “Abandoning Ethereum” and Ethereum “Abandoning Users” immediately caused extremely optimistic predictions about ETH from the project’s AllCoreDevs, the teams working on Layer 2 solutions and infrastructure, to the community members who were listening . However, while Zhu Ethereum has apparently turned its back on other centralized options, it appears to have changed his mind as Three Arrows Capital has bought over 100,000 ETH in the past few days. This shows that Zhu tends to rotate his inventory faster than the transaction processing speed on Solana. When Su Zhu started hyping a coin on Twitter, he thought of validating another project.

Nate Chastain

Dramatic stories always happen somewhere in crypto space, but a week in September saw equally fascinating controversies. As Bitcoin magazine As reported, WalMart announced a partnership with Litecoin, much to the surprise of most who pay attention to the area. Reuters and CNBC also contributed to the news and the LTC price jump, before the press release the news was fake. After that, the LTC price collapsed just as quickly as it rose while the mainstream press felt embarrassed.

The next day, Solana was down because bots spammed the network when Grape Protocol IDO started on Raydium and prevented the processing of blocks. The high-speed chain’s founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, denied the outage, claiming the situation was comparable to Ethereum’s exorbitant gas fees that drove users out of the market and that the chain remained closed 18 hours later.

However, the most shocking story this week involved OpenSea’s product manager, Nate Chastain. A well-known figure in the NFT community, Chastain is well known on Crypto Twitter for his NFT avatar CryptoPunk and his ENS domain name. However, his online presence (combined with a number of wrong decisions) ultimately contributed to his downfall. When he linked his Ethereum address to his name and online identity, a detective in the chain identified a series of transactions that revealed he had bought NFTs from artists just minutes before they were advertised on the internet.

As soon as these assets gain in value at the time of listing, Chastain sells them for a quick profit and then sells the earned ETH back to the address provided. Everyone could see the public ledger, so his resignation the next day was inevitable. OpenSea is valued at $ 10 billion this year, so Chastain, an early member of the team, could easily bring in eight-digit equity. Instead, he received 19 ETH worth around $ 65,000 and disappeared from the NFT community without a trace.

Divergence company

When you get the news of a potential project airdrop, there is much to be gained by interacting with the log from multiple addresses. It also means that there is always a risk that insider will take coins with them from the airdrop and leave with a handsome sum, as Ribbon Finance and Divergence Ventures reported in October.

Shortly after the DeFi project distributed tokens to early supporters, on-chain analyst gabagool.eth became suspicious when he noticed an address that was receiving funds from multiple wallets, RBNs for $ 2.5 million in ETH had sold. Through ENS, he learned that the wallet belonged to Bridget Harris, an employee of Divergence Ventures, a VC firm that backed Ribbon with a $ 25,000 seed capital investment. Ribbon admitted to alerting the fund about the token airdrop but did not provide any criteria.

Further analysis shows that the company has developed airdrops for every project it invests in and is likely to use the internal position to obtain tokens that should have been distributed to other community members. Divergence founders Calvin Liu and George Lambeth published a series of insincere apologies and excuses for their actions, saying their goal is to “make money” they are not the only team that used this tactic before they did Returned RBN tokens. But that’s not all they have lost, because their reputation has also been damaged after this incident.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is indeed a big hit in 2021. Musk first praised the Dogecoin meme and inspired the wave of dog coins, but was later replaced by Shiba Inu due to a lack of basic use cases. There have been false posts about Bitcoin and Ethereum not being able to scale like Dogecoin. Worst of all, Tesla would stop accepting BTC payments due to alleged environmental concerns that came just before the worst market crash since Black Thursday. However, Tesla kept BTC on its balance sheet after announcing $ 1.5 billion in investments in February.

Musk also told the world that Dogecoin was a “hype” on Saturday Night Live, causing its prices to crash. It was then that he realized that his words alone could change the market. Since then, Musk has been less influential. But after this year, the crypto community realizes that just one tweet is enough to move the market 10% either way – and there may be no reason to move past a billion dollars.

Moon guide

Moon Guurl, a self-proclaimed crypto enthusiast by the name of Rea, makes no secret of the fact that she wants to brand herself a crypto influencer when she joins the space in mid-2020 and makes boring, questionable posts about where the market might head next . Their following quickly reached large numbers from which crypto projects looking for greater reach could benefit.

She then received an offer from the Isla Inu Meme project in exchange for 1% of the project’s token offer. As the famous Twitter user zachxbt did shown, the real face of the Mondguurl was revealed when she decided to tweet about the project without revealing how she benefited from it and then sold her stash of tokens for 22.8 ETH, around $ 100,000 at the time.

The token was so illiquid that it almost dropped to zero, meaning the Mondguurl carpeted anyone who bought the project after their tweet. She pretends to be innocent by claiming she doesn’t understand the liquidity problem, which is believable given the previous relative entry price. However, the moon guurl made matters worse by showing no remorse about the incident and claiming that Crypto Twitter bullied her and made her nervous. Of all the mistakes she’s made, it’s hard to find which is worse: secret sponsorship deals, carpet-drawing, or psychological ailments to justify what she is doing. Either way, Mondguurl …