I have some very serious concerns about Arcblock (ABT) that you'll want to hear if you're holding this token, or if you're thinking about researching it and adding it to your portfolio. If I had this, I would immediately dump it, because here's the reality as I see it. Arcblock has just had a big price pump recently after years, just years, of doing nothing and being in the crapper. It recently went from 10 cents all the way up to a couple of dollars. And my spidey sense, after 10 years in crypto, says these are very intentionally manipulated pumps that are not based on any real value or proposition. That's my opinion, not financial advice, but here's what I've found in my research.
A lot of you have been asking me about this. You're saying, oh, Arcblock claims that it's just like ICP, and they're putting out memes on their Twitter feed where it's like, oh, you've got all these other things like ICP and Bitcoin, and is that all you need? And then there's a little Arcblock meme tacked on. So you're all asking me to take a look at this. Well, here's what I see.
It's an ERC-20 that has been on Ethereum since 2018
If you go to the chain explorer and click through to Etherscan, you'll find this is an ERC-20, which means the reality is this token is a coin on Ethereum. It has been a coin on Ethereum since 2018. And in six years, it only has 22,000 holders. Come on, man. This token has been around almost as long as DFINITY, which is the research and development team behind Internet Computer Protocol.
Arcblock put out a video five years ago calling itself the next generation blockchain 3.0, the world's first blockchain ecosystem for building and deploying decentralized applications. Well, I've got news. Internet Computer Protocol is actually out. It actually works. It's been around for almost three years now. It's functioning. Arcblock, meanwhile, is an ERC-20 token with nothing to show for it that I can see. If you're trying to understand why I keep coming back to that comparison, I dig into it deeper with the people in my community, where I share what I'm actually buying and why.
The documentation is mostly empty
If you go to the website, it says it will redefine software architecture and ecosystem, a total solution for building decentralized applications. Okay, so where can I use it? I went looking for anywhere I could actually use this. I looked at the documentation, and it looks like there's a lot of it at first, until you realize most of it is repetitive, and it looks like it hasn't been updated. You click on something like "getting started," and what is this? A blank, freaking page. Serious?
Like, y'all have got to start doing your research. I swear to God, if I see this, I'm going to be like, oh, this is one more of the portfolios people show me on a one-on-one call where they're holding something like this, and they haven't gone to the freaking website and clicked through the documentation. This token has been around since 2018, and there's empty documentation on the website. Come on, guys. Come on, man. And then you get to the FAQ, and it just continues to get worse.
A price chart doing multiples with no substance behind it
Now look at the price chart. People are talking about, oh, look, it did some 10x, 10x, 10x to a dollar, three, forty, whatever multiples it's done. Now look at the website. Is there any reason it should do multiples? This is horrible. If you click the about page, Arcblock's mission is, "we want to make decentralized applications a part of our everyday lives by making it easily accessible and useful." Oh, you mean like Internet Computer? That's what y'all are trying to do. Okay, so show me what you've done. In six years, your token is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Show me what you've done. There's some generic crap on the website, and the centerpiece is that same five-year-old video.
That five-year-old video on their about page has only 3,000 views. I mean, I put out a video of me doing almost anything and it gets 3,000 views in a day. They put this out five years ago, and it's still their featured video on their about page. Oh my god. This whole pattern of a coin claiming to be the next big thing with nothing underneath it is exactly why I made the case that crypto market caps are a distraction and you have to look at what's actually been built. If you want to watch more of my coin breakdowns, I keep them all in my Money playlist.
"Join the Arcblock team" — but there is no team listed
Now it still gets worse. It says join the Arcblock team. Where's the team? Join who? Where are y'all trying to get these people from? Maybe they don't have time to edit anything or write documentation because there's only one person working on it. I mean, this has become stand-up comedy at this point. Y'all can't be serious about investing in this, and it's on Coinbase.
Let me show you what a real team in crypto looks like, the largest research and development team in the space. The DFINITY Foundation started up around the same time Arcblock did, and they've built the most advanced technology in the space by far. And I'm all in on ICP. Look at their about page. You've got Dominic Williams with a bunch of talks online, Jan winning awards, tons of engineers, people from IBM, Google, all over the place, tons of technical talent, tons of PhDs, cryptographers. That's a real team. Now go to the about page for Arcblock. Not only does it say join the Arcblock team without telling you how to do that, there's not one single team member listed. Come on, man. Seriously. And y'all are investing in this. This empty team page is the same red flag I pointed out in my Humanity (H) review, where a multi-billion-dollar coin had a 404 team page.
Then you look at their YouTube channel. Five years ago, 960 subscribers. Their last video was four months ago, a short with 184 views. I say that to point out they don't really care about y'all at all. I can hardly go a day without posting a video, and this is a $500 million project that almost no one is interested in, because it doesn't seem like there's any substance to it.
Where I actually found some substance — and where the "on-chain" story falls apart
Now, to be fair, let me show you what I did find. Remember the documentation I just showed you? If you click on applications and go to the NFT studio, and you look at the documentation for how to build a complete NFT program, this actually has some documentation. Install NFT maker. Wow, there is actually a little bit of substance to the NFT maker. I wasn't ready for a page to actually have something on it. NFT blender, too. They do have some real documentation here, which is nice. I'm impressed. It's not all complete crap. So I guess they do care about making NFTs, because if you can't make NFTs, you really can't do anything.
But then it talks about a block launcher to start your project, a pages kit for everyone to build site landing pages, on-chain tools. Yeah, what exactly is on-chain about it? So let's search the docs for IPFS. Oh my god. It's talking about everything being on-chain, but all the documentation I clicked on was empty, so I went through and looked for where it was completely lying about being decentralized. Look at this guide: a unique identity address for everything in the Arcblock ecosystem, the ID algorithm appendix, and at step 10 you encode the binary value using Bitcoin, or using IPFS multibase to encode. That's telling. So y'all are putting stuff on IPFS now. That means it's not really on the blockchain, because you don't need IPFS if your stuff is really on the blockchain. These are conceptual guides, too, so it's not like a fully on-chain thing the way ICP is. You're putting stuff on IPFS.
And then a bunch of the documentation isn't even updated. Some of it is literally blank. You click on some of the guides and they're literally blank. Create NFT, blank. I was amazed I actually found one that wasn't blank. One page literally says, "this page is a draft." And this is $500 million spent over six years. Do I really need to say anything else about this? It's horrible.
The supply is dangerously concentrated
And of course, the top 100 holders have 85% of this token. One single wallet has 32% of the tokens and has been around for six years. This should be much more decentralized by now. The next wallet has 15%, so the top two wallets alone hold 47% of the supply. That means it's very easy to manipulate the price and push it up. And then the price chart is practically guaranteed to do what it did before, where it went from a dollar-something two bull markets ago all the way down to seven cents. It had an amazingly weak bull market in 2021, and now someone has decided to manipulate it up. Some money must have changed hands to artificially push the price up.
My verdict on Arcblock
So this to me looks like an absolute dumpster fire. A project doing the bare minimum to rip people off: incomplete documentation, an inauthentic value proposition, trying to act like it's ICP and that it's all you need. In my opinion, this is absolute junk, an ERC-20 token, a very dangerous investment, probably grossly overvalued already, with a very high likelihood of going to zero in my view. That's my honest read, not financial advice. It's the same gut feeling I had reviewing BitGet Token (BGB), a coin I'd never hold.
I'm sharing all this because I actually care about you as an investor, instead of trying to just talk positive about everything and make myself as much money as possible, like most people do in crypto. I'm tired of y'all getting ripped off on stuff like this. If you appreciate my honesty, the best place to keep this conversation going is inside my community, where I'll happily look at what you're holding before you find out the hard way. And I think I've said enough.