My friends, I think you will appreciate seeing my honest review of Hyra Network, which to me looks like a total scam. There is no way I would participate in this. The token looks fundamentally worthless to me. I am saying this because there is so much better you can invest in across crypto, and I am hoping to help you avoid wasting your time and energy on something like this. Among a pile of hype videos talking about how great this supposedly is, I want to be the voice that says what I genuinely believe: this is a pretty bad idea. So if you appreciate that, let's dig into what I think is awful about it.
The First Red Flags
First of all, if you go to their website at hyra.network, this is currently not even listed on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko or anything like that. They seem to think it looks great and that they are going to get a big bag out of it. To me it looks easy to see through. So when you hear the latest hyped-up narratives, AI and DePIN, and you see a "decentralized network shaping the future of AI," in my experience the ideal posture as an investor is to be immediately skeptical. Say: prove it. Show me you're different. Because there is real AI infrastructure that is absolutely changing the game, and that is Internet Computer Protocol, where you can run AI models as real smart contracts, 100% on the blockchain. In my view that is what's necessary if you are going to truly decentralize AI, because if you are not running the AI completely on the blockchain, it is not actually decentralized and it has the same problems as the rest of AI.
So when I see something throwing in all these keywords, AI model training, DePIN, real-world assets, my first thought is that you are just trying to trigger people's narratives. I am immediately skeptical as to whether they can deliver, because I know how hard it is to make something like this for real, and I also know it is very easy to fake like you are making something like this.
The first sentence on the site calls it "the pioneering layer three blockchain," and my honest first thought is: what a pile of trash. A layer three blockchain? Because you know what is worse than a layer two blockchain? Building a layer three on top of it. I will be upfront that I personally am not big on layer twos. I have used Ethereum layer twos and they mostly suck. You are bridging your Ethereum, which means you are subject to the bridge, where you send your Ethereum to use it on the layer two, getting hacked and destroyed. If that happens to anybody, the whole thing could go down. So layer twos are very risky to begin with. A layer three is multiplicative risk: all the risks of the layer one, times all the risks of the layer two, times all the risks of the layer three. How could that possibly go wrong?
What Real Decentralized AI Actually Takes
When I see them talking about AI model training and decentralized AI infrastructure, I think about how much money and how many people it has taken on DFINITY's team at Internet Computer. The team at dfinity.org has put thousands of person-years in, the biggest team in crypto for research and development. It has taken a lot of talent and a lot of time to make a solution for AI that actually makes a huge difference for the world. So immediately my BS detector is going off. I have reviewed thousands of altcoins. If you have read Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, I have gotten to the point with cryptos where as soon as I see the website, my fraud detector goes off the same way an art expert sees a piece and says, "fake, this is a fake." As soon as I see this, I think: fake. I don't believe any of it. And looking into the details, it keeps getting worse.
This is another base junk coin. Right now, Base is one of the most popular places to launch a junk coin, because Coinbase's layer two gives you access to a lot of users and a lot of liquidity. But it is an Ethereum layer two where pretty much all you can do is transactions. You might be used to that across the rest of crypto, but I am not anymore, because there is technology where you can do more than transactions, and to me that is only Internet Computer Protocol. So when you are talking decentralized AI and you are built on Base off of Ethereum, it tells me that all you really care about is the liquidity. That is all. You don't care about the investors at all. You just want to make as much money for yourself as possible.
A Roadmap and Website That Tell the Story
Now look at this roadmap, which does not look like it has been updated at all since Q2 2024. That looks like the last time they put a point on the timeline. Last time I checked, it was March 11th, 2025 when I am filming this and March 12th, 2025 when I will publish it, and for some reason their roadmap has not gotten there yet. In fact, it has not even made it to Q3. Sloppiness on a part of an application that is trying to talk about decentralized AI is bad. And there is much more.
Little signs like a 2024 copyright are sloppy. When you are not paying attention to your own website, it tells me something. I have a simple website because I do not have a web developer; I do my website myself on Internet Computer Protocol, and I am updating little things all the time, even if it is just changing a link. I move my Twitch link down, then delete it when I stop live streaming, then put it back up when I go live again. I am very attentive to my website even though it is simple. Your website is one of your main resources as a crypto project, and it is really sloppy when you are not updating the details, which tells me you are not paying attention, which tells me I do not want to use this.
They have also worked to build a couple of websites with some junk products. Look at this "Hyra wallet": "Safety for your investment journey. The only comprehensive wallet designed for every step of your cryptocurrency journey." That is a pile of crap. ICP has the most incredibly advanced wallet technology in crypto, where you can hold your Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICP, Solana, and stablecoins all in one single wallet without some third party having your private keys, and you can use your device to sign in. It is amazing, and you can build any kind of wallet on there. This is just crap, some wallet calling itself the most comprehensive when they clearly do not know what other wallets are out there. Obviously it is just another browser extension, which is subject to being hacked and phished and getting you cleaned out. Don't you have enough browser extensions at this point? That is what is special about ICP's wallet: you do not have to add a browser extension. How many of you are saying you will never install another browser extension wallet again? I am tired of browser extension wallets. And then there is an app on your phone as well, with its own problematic issues.
The "Ecosystem" Gets Worse
Let's keep looking. Here is one of the websites they link to as part of their ecosystem, called HireABid. If you look at this, it is absolutely scummy. Have you seen these bid websites? These are one of the nastiest things I have seen online, where you place these little micro-bids and it tricks you. You see a Louis Vuitton bag and it says this person paid $2.50 for a $2,000 bag with 19,000 bids placed. But if you understand how these work, the people probably spent something like $19,000 in bids trying to win that bag. It is shockingly slimy. You have to buy bids and then participate in the auction. This is absolutely scummy, and they are linking to it as an example of their ecosystem. Gross.
Now let's look at the founding team. At least they do have some pictures. But are these real people, or are these AI-generated avatars? There are no links to any profiles, no LinkedIn, no X profiles. One of these especially looks like some kind of AI-generated avatar; it does not even look like a real person. It looks too artificially polished. Maybe they are real people who took pictures on a green screen, or maybe some used avatars. But another issue is: where are the engineers? There are hardly any engineers here for a project doing decentralized AI. You would generally need a good number of qualified AI engineers to build a decentralized AI protocol. The founding team starts with a chief strategy officer, then a CEO and founder, and a CTO co-founder. So who actually has AI experience here? What is a "blockchain leader"? What is a "BE leader"? What is an "FE leader"? What is a "developer FE"? Are these engineering leaders? That is not a term I have seen before.
Bots Everywhere
The address says Singapore, but if you go on the X account it says United Arab Emirates. So which is it? The account has 150,000 followers, and it is not followed by anyone I am following. Almost all of the projects I review are followed by somebody I follow, and nobody is following this. So who are all these impressions going out to? It looks like they are just botting the account as usual. Same kind of stuff I see on practically every one of these. Look at this example: March 10, then another March 10, with almost the exact same number of comments, literally 1.7K, 2.2K, 2.1K. That is a very high engagement rate, and clearly it is what botting looks like, when your posts all have nearly identical numbers. I just scrolled through and that was literally the first couple of posts I ran into. I have been doing digital marketing so long that I can smell the bots. They are botting their account, and they botted their YouTube channel too.
Look how hard they cheated their YouTube channel. If you click one of these shorts, there is a warning from YouTube that the content is altered or synthetic, and there are only 35 likes on a video claiming 960K views. So they are using fake AI content on YouTube to bot their channel while offering some AI referral commission. But there are only three videos on the channel, and nothing has been posted for three months. They talk about passive income and edge devices, but where are the people in these videos? These are just AI videos they made. They botted the heck out of their X and the heck out of their YouTube.
Now look at the Explorer. If you click into the Hyra Network Explorer, the latest blocks are from four days ago, with two transactions. I am just saying that is not a great sign. I do not know what has been going on, but whatever it is, it is not much. Then the team and documentation are very sparse.
The Details Don't Even Match
Go back to the team. Do these even match across pages? The CTO co-founder matches. The CEO co-founder matches. But where is the other guy listed first, the chief strategy officer, Tran Nam Chung? This guy is a founder, but I don't even see him on the other page. Did he get cut from the roster? And again, they could not even be bothered to spell out "BE leader" or "FE leader," whatever those mean.
Remember how all the websites said this was a Base layer three? Now look at how the documentation talks about Arbitrum. It looks like the documentation was just copied from some other Arbitrum docs, with a whole bunch of third-party docs involving these other networks and more about how Arbitrum works. But remember, the website itself says "blockchain, layer 2, Base." Come on, guys. Doing your own research is shockingly easy sometimes. I have a guy messaging me saying he is going to get a big load of this because it looks good to him. Come on, seriously? This is horrible.
If you are tired of horrible cryptos, in my experience the antidote is doing the homework before you ever put money in. I have researched thousands of coins, and I love when people show me their portfolio and I can go through it quickly. The hard part is when I see the same coins I have already said are going to zero filling up someone's whole portfolio. None of this is financial advice, just what I have come to believe after reviewing so many of these projects. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, you can dig into my Money playlist, where I share much more of my approach to investing and avoiding traps like Hyra Network.