MASA is a fake AI cryptocurrency in my opinion, and I'm going to review it here, because I'm very confident it's going to zero. It looks to me like an absolutely horrible investment designed purely to rip people off. I've been in crypto 10 years and reviewed thousands of altcoins, and this one just leaves me feeling infuriated for all the people who got tricked into buying it, because I can see how obviously horrible it is to me immediately.
The chart and the tokenomics
So if we start off looking at the chart, this is a newer coin that has already managed to dump 81%, and according to the self-reported circulating supply, only 20% of it is out yet. So this is hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap, and if you look and see what this is, there are plenty of token unlocks. Huge token unlocks. Most of it, 80% of the tokens, are still locked, with huge token unlocks after huge token unlocks coming. That supply is going to come down on everybody.
But look at this. It says MASA is the decentralized AI data and LLM network. On the about page, it says MASA is the leading decentralized AI data and LLM network. That, in my opinion, is provably false. I mean, to me that is a blatant, in-your-face lie. That is ridiculous. If you want the leader in blockchain AI, in my view it is Internet Computer. That's the leader. It's the only thing that I believe can actually do AI fully on chain. There's nothing else I've seen that can do AI fully on chain. I went off on all these fake AI cryptos in my previous video called "the fake AI crypto versus Internet Computer protocols," and I still believe ICP is the only real AI coin.
How easy it is to make a token, how hard it is to deliver
What you need to understand is how easy it is for someone to create a token and then do marketing and branding and talk about AI, and how difficult it is to actually execute on that. And this to me, you know, I've done this so many times. Like if you read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, I literally, as soon as I look at the website and it says "fair AI powered by the people," I immediately feel disgusted. I feel like I know this is a fraudulent crypto project that has no real chance, in my opinion, of delivering on what it says it's doing.
If you want to really see what a project is capable of, try to find the team of engineers working on it. If this was truly fair AI powered by the people, and it says it's a decentralized AI network where you can earn by contributing your data, then where is the team? I mean, this feels to me like Jasmine, which I also consider a blatant ripoff crypto, and I broke that down in my JasmyCoin review of why I think it goes to zero.
And if you look at the about page, it says it's a decentralized AI network. Where exactly is it a decentralized AI network? It's not on chain. It says AI developers can build anything anywhere with the world's data. I mean, this is something that's been written to trick you. There's no proof that it's doing anything it says it's doing. There's not one single person listed on this page. This is textbook ripoff, you know, like crypto mafia style right here.
Why I trust what I can verify on ICP instead
If you take this for granted, that that's okay, but I don't. I have 90% of my portfolio on Internet Computer, because I can see the team of hundreds of engineers that are actually building this. I can watch them on YouTube talking about exactly what breakthroughs they're doing. They have real AI on chain. And if your AI is not fully on chain, in my opinion it's useless. I've done a bunch of videos on Jerry Banfield Crypto about that. So this MASA project to me is just lies. If it was the truth, it wouldn't be written like this. This is written to trick people into thinking it's good. It's not written to provide something that's real. This is the kind of crypto review I share every week with the Jerry Banfield Family, where I go through projects in detail.
And there's no massive team listed, not one person. They've gone over the top on being fraudulent, too, because they talk about combined technical experience with Coinbase, Polygon, PayPal, Ocean. They've got all these investors listed on here. Maybe they're accurate, and maybe they're lies, but they've run a bit too over the top on putting all these logos on. And this is textbook. If you want to rip people off, I mean, I've been in digital marketing 13 years, you throw up these logos that people recognize. And some of these are so random, like "as seen on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ and the World Economic Forum and CNN." This is so random, just throwing all these seeming credentials up here. Where's the proof of this? Not one of these things is linked. There are no links. I've seen websites like this back when I started digital marketing 13 years ago. This was a template to rip people off back then, where you put a few links up, "oh, I've been seen on Forbes and Entrepreneur."
The social media tells the story
And then let's look at their social media, their X account. This account of course joined in 2021, when everybody got into crypto except me, because I'd been in for seven years by then. It has 200-and-some thousand followers, and I'd guarantee you the vast majority of these are bots. Again, that's the crypto mafia playbook: launch something that sounds good, make a website, try to hype it up on narratives, get a bunch of bots to follow your X account.
But unlike some of these other cryptos that are doing a better job at being fraudulent, this one is not pushing all their individual posts with bots. Which means it doesn't even have enough money behind it to really do a good job faking it. Look at the reach on their posts. I have like 7,000 followers on my X, and the reach on their posts is similar to the reach on my posts, and they have 200,000 followers.
It's a Bittensor subnet token
And here's the thing: this is part of Bittensor. I've said Bittensor is going to zero. I absolutely can't stand the project. To me it's a fake AI crypto project where they're raising a bunch of money, but there's no real ability that I see to deliver value to investors. And this MASA is part of the Bittensor ecosystem. It says that MASA arrived on Bittensor as the first live token of any subnet. So this is a token on something else that I've already said is going to zero in my message to Bittensor TAO holders.
You always have to create endless amounts of tokens to rip people off, because if you've got a real quality thing like ICP, you can just keep sticking with it and building it better. But you'll notice, like, I imagine this is created by some of the same people behind Bittensor, to create another token to rip people off, because the more fraudulent your crypto is, the more difficult it gets to actually keep it going over any length of time.
So this is a newer project, and it's already down 80%. And the explorers are not even linked correctly. This is how you can often find things going to zero, by how sloppy they are. The chain explorers on this are linked to Avalanche, but if you click on the chain explorers and go to Avalanche, there's hardly anything happening on Avalanche. So having done a lot of research on tokens myself, I figured, well, they probably incorrectly linked the explorers and didn't put the right ones on there.
Spread across chains, concentrated in a few wallets
Sure enough, this is another crypto mafia scam template: get your token on as many different chains as possible, because then you can rip people off on so many different ecosystems. So you've got this on Base. And Base is where they appear to have gotten most of their holders from. There are 30,000 holders on Base. Base is the new top layer two on Ethereum to launch garbage coins, because there are so many people on it.
So you can see the wallets. You've got 86% of the tokens here in these Hedgey Finance lockups. And if you look at the token holders chart, the top 500 have 96% of the tokens on Base. Extremely centralized. Then, just to make sure they really get all the different ways to screw you over across chains, there's a token on Binance Smart Chain that has 3,500 holders, but this only has a few hundred thousand dollar market cap. Then there's an ERC-20 token as well that only has a couple thousand holders. And then most of it is on Base. So these are extremely centralized wallets.
And I don't see any path here. I have 99.9% confidence there's no way they deliver fair AI. Now, "fair AI" sounds good, "fair AI powered by the people." But what I'm thinking is, who is getting paid to work on this? Where's the technology, the patents, the thing that makes this valuable? How are you going to earn by contributing your data? What data are you going to contribute? There's nothing here that actually looks good to me about this.
Holding the token gives you nothing
And tokens offer you no real legal ownership and no ownership by code either, unless it's an SNS token on ICP. Because by holding the token, you don't control anything. Even if the team — if there is a team and not just one or two people, which is what many of these projects really are — even if they actually make something valuable, owning the token doesn't give you any control or ownership over all the stuff that's off chain. And this project, more than likely, there's not going to be almost anything really happening in terms of the tech itself.
So this to me is a guaranteed loser going to zero. There's absolutely no way I would touch this. If somebody dumped some in my wallet somehow, I'd immediately get rid of it, burn it or sell it, because there are so many better cryptos to invest in. This is another lie, another trick, in my opinion. And until they get a team of people listed on the website, get honest about all the bots they paid for on their X account, and give some clear idea of exactly how any of this is real and not just words and deception — and I see that as very unlikely — to me, in 99.9% of scenarios, this goes to zero. And I hope it doesn't take you with it.
This took me about 15 minutes, and I hope it can save some of you from losing money in something that obviously looks horrible to me. If you found this helpful, you can watch more of my honest coin reviews in my Money playlist, where I review as many cryptos as I can.