Dear ZetaChain crypto holders, this is something you will really want to read, because I care about your success as a crypto investor. I was recording a live stream where I was viewing cryptos, and Jake asked me to talk about Zeta. I want you to be successful investing in crypto, and there is some very important information you need to see about Zeta right now.
I have been in crypto for 11 years. I have researched thousands of altcoins. At this point it is pretty easy for me to look at a coin, form an opinion on it, and share that with you. The hard truth is that almost all coins in crypto turn out to be losers over time. So you really have to find something that is special. The question is: is ZetaChain special? Not from what I can see.
Please note that I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. I should also be upfront that I hold at least 10,000 Internet Computer Protocol, or ICP, myself, so that will heavily bias what I have to say. That said, my primary purpose here is to get out there and help you and to make useful content for you every day.
The market cap and the token unlocks worry me
When I look at Zeta, it already has a several hundred million dollar market cap, but when you look at the fully diluted figure, it looks like there are a lot more token unlocks coming. The market cap versus the total fully diluted valuation is awful. It looks like there are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens that have not been unlocked yet. This is a new coin. They are at roughly a $200 million market cap. This is a new blockchain.
I am personally totally against investing in anything new, because there are projects like Internet Computer Protocol that have already been out for almost four years now, that in my view have the best technology in crypto, and that you do not have to guess or hope will eventually turn into something. In my experience, the biggest place people get ripped off in crypto is new launches, especially ones that are already valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.
What I see when I look at the actual data
When you look at the actual Zeta website, you should just look this up yourself. Do not take my word for it. I am looking at the data, I can see it, and you can go look it up yourself. What I share is meant as a jumping off place for you to learn things for yourself. When I go to the ZetaScan website, I am seeing blocks that are five seconds apart, which to me is outrageous. Internet Computer Protocol is doing something like 70 blocks a second. It is hosting websites and building applications fully on chain, and it is only valued a little bit more than ZetaChain, and it has been out almost four years.
When you compare that to what I see happening on ZetaChain, you are looking at a handful of transactions, maybe 5 or 10 a second. Internet Computer Protocol and Solana are doing thousands of transactions a second. I do not see that much adoption right now on ZetaChain to merit the market cap it has.
It also has gas. To me, being a ZK EVM and charging gas is the way cryptos did things 10 years ago when they were coming out, like Ethereum. On my OpenChat, you can use the actual Internet Computer blockchain, not a third party wallet sitting in between us, and you can create transactions directly on the blockchain totally for free, without buying any of the crypto and without paying any gas fees, because the developers pay the gas fees. So in my opinion, having a gas price is outdated right now, and it is especially outdated for a brand new blockchain.
I do not see the team
I go to the ZetaChain.com website and I look at the company, and you know what I do not see? I do not see the team. I do not see any people who are actually putting their faces out there and saying, "Hey, we are working on this." Now, maybe I missed something, which is exactly why you should look stuff up yourself. But I do not see the people behind ZetaChain.
Here is how I think about it. If I am proud of my work, I put my face on it and I take ownership of it. If I am not proud of my work, I turn my face off or put a helmet on and do anonymous videos so that I can go around online saying whatever I want, doing whatever I want, and getting away with it in real life. You can see how I operate. I put my face on my work because I am proud of it. I have integrity, and I am telling you whatever is true for me this second.
I do not trust anything in crypto that does not have very clear people associated with the project. In any investment you are making, at some point the ground level comes down to people. When you are buying into a layer like ZetaChain or Internet Computer Protocol, what you are ultimately buying is how valuable the protocol is going to be based on the work that real human beings are doing to engineer it, and based on who else is going to use it.
If you look at DFINITY.org, you can see that Internet Computer Protocol has a whole bunch of people's faces who are actually working on the project. You can see what I believe is the largest research and development team in blockchain. You can see all kinds of PhDs and engineers, and you can watch them presenting the things they have worked on. Without that, it is not trustworthy to me. On the ZetaChain website, I do not even see a link to a YouTube channel, and that is not trustworthy to me.
Now, if the team is watching this, you could get your faces on there. Some of the teams I have made videos like this about have since put their faces on their website and added links to their X profiles. You could start a YouTube channel. But without that, I do not trust it, and there is no way I would get involved in a project where I cannot see who is working on it, watch videos from many different members of the team, and see how it has performed over time. ZetaChain is too new for even that.
None of this rules out a price pump
Just because it is new, and just because of the things I have said, does not mean it cannot have some manipulated price pump. It does not mean it cannot have some kind of organic price pump, although that seems hard to imagine. Anything could happen. But based on what I have seen researching it myself in just 15 minutes, I do not see any reason I would put money into this instead of letting my cash sit in the bank or putting it into Internet Computer Protocol.
That said, I have only looked at this for a little while. But I have researched thousands of cryptos, so I can usually look at things very quickly, and I have gone through the documentation a bit. What I can see is that the node specifications are tiny: four core CPUs and 16 gigabytes of memory. These nodes are not very powerful. When you look up what the ZetaChain tech can do based on that, it does not look like it can host front ends. It is the same as all these blockchains besides ICP. You can hardly even put a phone photo directly on the blockchain.
Even AI programs like Grok do not understand this level of nuance that I am describing. You can have a blockchain that sends transactions and does basic smart contracts, but if all the front end the users go through, plus the wallets, plus the backend, plus the heavy data computation, is all off chain, that means there is nothing actually decentralized. Effectively it is all centralized. This is very concerning to me, and I hope you will keep it in mind.
I will review many, many more coins and share them, because I want you all to have a chance to do your own research and I want to assist you in doing it. If you want to go deeper on how I think about money and investing, you can explore my Money playlist. Again, this is not financial advice. This is simply my research on ZetaChain, and it is why I am not holding any.