You're about to read an honest review that exposes Taraxa, includes a price prediction, and tells you everything they don't want you to know. I'm doing this because I care about you as a crypto investor, and I don't want you to lose any more money or waste any more time in crypto. I've been in crypto since 2014, and I've researched thousands of altcoins. It's easy for me to take a couple of minutes to dig into a coin and give you my opinion to help you, so let's take a look. I think you'll really enjoy this.
Some of you have been mentioning Taraxa because, on the lists of fastest blockchains by transactions per second, Taraxa recently popped up toward the top, above ICP and Solana. My first thought was that somebody at Taraxa decided to try to cheat the metrics. It took me less than 10 minutes to find some pretty solid evidence that this is exactly what's happening. But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let me back up.
Starting with the price chart
This launched back in 2021, so it has already rug pulled quite a bit, down 90%. Then it came back up to close to a cent. But my real question is this: what value does this project actually provide for humanity? Does it stand out in a way that's unique? How does it compare to the best I see in crypto, which in my opinion is Internet Computer Protocol? Overall, it doesn't look too good to me.
If you look at the about page, Taraxa is an EVM-compatible smart contract platform using BlockDAG. So what? When you look at one of its supposed real-world applications, it celebrates being the first EVM-compatible BlockDAG. In my view, that innovative framing is misleading, because you can't put everything on chain with this technology. That means something like ICP is so far ahead technologically that this is, to me, completely irrelevant. It talks about industries it can serve, but it can only do tiny little transactions, and I don't see any evidence that there's actually a whole lot of real use here either.
Looking at the Taraxa team
Before I dive into the other problems I see, let's look at the team. At least the team does have some real people and some faces on it, which I really like, especially considering this is a project with a fully diluted market cap of less than 100 million right now. But why is the fully diluted market cap over double the circulating supply? Why is there still so much Taraxa that's not on the market? I don't like that. Maybe it's because half of it's staked or something. I don't know, but I have concerns there.
My number one concern is the core contributors. You've got a couple of co-founders, then an ecosystem lead, and three or four people on the ledger who don't even have last names listed, though they do have LinkedIn links. I don't use LinkedIn. Then you have a guy in the AI ecosystem, even though this tech can't really do anything meaningful with AI. Most of the team looks like ecosystem people. You've got a few working on the ledger, but roughly half the team is ecosystem. What I'm not seeing are all the engineers I'd like to see actually working on the protocol.
Compare this to something like dfinity.org, the major contributor to the Internet Computer blockchain. They have the largest research and development team in blockchain. Dominic Williams, the founder, said that if you want to really evaluate a team, look at how many real engineering people they have on the core team, because that tells you how many engineers are actually working on the protocol itself. With Taraxa, I don't see very many engineers, which suggests the actual technology doesn't have many core contributors working on it. It looks to me like mostly marketing people just maintaining what they already have. From this point of view, I see no evidence that the tech is going to improve over time in any meaningful way. They're already way behind projects like ICP in technology, and way behind almost all the higher-ranked projects in terms of users. I don't see a niche for this to fit into.
The transactions: where it really falls apart
Now to the transactions, because this is what so many of you wanted me to look at: why does this have more transactions than ICP or Solana? When you go into a block and look at the transactions, here's what I find. These are not contract calls. According to the explorer, there are separate things that count as contract calls. What I see instead is a ton of transfers, a ton of transfers carrying almost no value at all, and they appear to just be bot accounts sending transfers to each other.
Take one account participating in these transfers. I don't know the full context. I don't know if there's some reason for sending minuscule amounts of TARA back and forth between bot accounts a ton of times. But this one account has 87,000 transactions on it. You'll notice they're almost all worthless transactions, and they almost all come from one single 0x63 account. So there's just a flood of worthless transactions, and this one account sends almost all of them, thousands and thousands of transactions from a single source. To me, this looks like clear evidence of bot activity. If you go to that account and look at it, this single account, which has almost no balance in it, has sent 44 million transactions by itself.
Here's what it looks like they've done, in my read of it. At some point they saw people covering transactions per second on ChainSpect. And here's the awfully suspicious part: their real-time TPS just happens to be a tiny bit higher than Solana and ICP. They didn't make it silly, like 5,000 TPS, way higher. They kept it just a hair above. Right now I see almost nothing real actually happening with these transactions. That's a bad sign, when it looks like a project is more than likely intentionally faking a metric to try to get attention.
Compare this to Solana, which has some of the highest meme coin usage in all of crypto, or ICP, which in my opinion has the absolute best technology in crypto. Some of the transactions on ICP come from people like me who have a website hosted on ICP. When I update my website on ICP, that creates a transaction, and that's providing real value for humanity. But when you look at Taraxa, this appears to just be bot transactions trying to get attention. Faking bot transactions is one of the easiest ways to pop up in metrics and get discovered. And this is something you could verify yourself in just a few minutes.
What the website is really selling
That looks really bad to me, but I'm not done finding things that look bad. If you go to the Taraxa website at taraxa.io, it says POS, which I imagine is proof of stake and not piece of shit. Oh my God, I'm never going to be a stand-up comedian, but I've got jokes. POS, a "piece of shit" BlockDAG EVM-compatible Layer 1. It says it's supercharging DeFi and social AI. What can a BlockDAG EVM actually do with AI? Nothing, except host tokens that then do everything off chain. That's useless to me. There are bigger projects, and there are centralized companies with stocks, doing real AI. So this appears to me to just be a narrative play.
It boasts about being "the world's only EVM-compatible BlockDAG Layer 1." For the market cap this is at, if you can get enough people to believe this is good, maybe you could get a little action on it. But my question stays the same: is there real value for humanity here? Are we even going to reach the all-time highs on the chart again? I don't see any indication of that. When you go to the website, does it impress me with what it's doing? No. When they say they're number one in transactions per dollar, it looks to me like they've intentionally cheated that metric with bots, and then they're using it as a selling point.
Scroll down and look at what this does: fast, with the lowest-cost fees and hardware requirements in the world. What that tells me is that the nodes hardly do any computation. ICP nodes are pricey, around $50,000 to buy one, and that's because ICP nodes can run entire websites. They can replace the need for traditional cloud hosting, which is one of the most important things we need blockchain to do. Taraxa clearly can't do that. There are already other chains that have gone after the small, lightweight blockchain niche. As for the lowest transaction fees versus anything on the market, I'm not even sure that's true.
Then they say "vibrant ecosystem, explore DeFi," and they've got MetaMask on the ecosystem. Since it's EVM-compatible, you'd hope it would work with MetaMask. When you look at the resource efficiency section, they really blogged this out, claiming the highest TPS per dollar spent in the world. I just showed you the data. It doesn't look good at all. Just doing bot transactions does not impress me. And notice they excluded ICP from that comparison. Of course they excluded ICP, because if they included it, that would make them look bad. As usual, it's: cut out the one thing that would really put your project in perspective.
Look at their ecosystem. Have you ever heard of any of these things? You've got MetaMask, and then things like the "Taraxa One bot," the first token bot on the Taraxa chain, powered by AI. Maybe it's generating a bunch of activity, I don't know. But that's going to run off chain. It's not running on the chain itself with the nodes they have.
Compare the YouTube channels
Let's look at their YouTube channel too. At least they've done one video eight days ago, but they hadn't posted a video for a year before that. So there's been very little happening. During the last bull market, when this released, you see all kinds of videos of a guy writing on a whiteboard. Lots of videos of a guy writing on a whiteboard. Tons of content during the last bull market. But what's happening now? Why is there almost nothing new on the channel?
Some of you might assume this is just what every coin does, but it is not what every coin does. Look at DFINITY, which came out in 2021, around the same time as Taraxa. Look at the DFINITY and ICP content: roadmap updates, the NNS explained, global research and development, the world computer, the Network Nervous System with Kyle Langham. They have 554 videos, but most importantly, look at how they keep coming out all the time. It doesn't matter whether it's a bull market or a bear market, the videos keep cranking out constantly.
Why I judge a project by what it does in the bear market
I know a lot of you may be used to projects that just launch in a bull market, do a bunch of work, and then pretty much give up once the bear market arrives. I don't accept that. To me, that's the sign of a crappy project. When a team gives up, doesn't put a single video out for a year on their YouTube channel, and makes almost no effort during the bear market after they made this huge effort during the bull market, that tells you everything you need to know. That's a sign of a project that is not serious.
A lot of projects now are doing the opposite of that. They're trying to start pushing stuff out into what they hope will be the next bull market, and in my view that's fraudulent. They're timing their effort to the hype instead of building consistently through the quiet years.
My honest read on Teraxa
I'm not impressed by anything I see on Teraxa. It all looks to me like it's going to trend toward zero, because I don't see why anybody would want to buy this right now. That's based on the research I did. I only took about 20 minutes to research this, if that, to set this up, but I know what to look for because I've been in crypto a long time.
The chart alone is a problem. This kind of chart scares people away, even on the best tech in the world like ICP. So a chart like this is definitely going to scare people away right from the start. It's far enough down the market cap that, honestly, it's irrelevant. It is listed on MEXC, but it's still not on a lot of the other big exchanges after four years. That, to me, puts it in a pretty bad spot.
I seriously doubt this goes anywhere. In my experience, something sitting in this position heads to zero 99.9% of the time. I want to be clear that this is my opinion based on what I've seen over years in this space, not financial advice, but I'd rather give you an honest read than tell you what you want to hear.
Why I do this research for you
I do this research because I want it to be helpful for people who are searching for Teraxa and would like some honest information from someone who has a lot of experience in crypto and genuinely cares about you being successful with your investments first and foremost. I take the time out of my day, when there are a thousand other things I'd like to be doing, to look at these projects honestly.
I've gone over a lot of crypto portfolios in my time, and the patterns tend to repeat. If you want more of my thinking on protecting and growing what you have, I put a lot of it together in my Money playlist, where I share what I've learned the hard way.