Guess who's back? Jerry's back with another "going to zero" video. This time it's some name I can't even pronounce. Onyxcoin? First off, disgusting branding. And there's a bunch of ambassadors out there shilling this stuff on YouTube, which makes me want to throw up. I'm tired of watching people get ripped off on this garbage. It is garbage, and here's why.
First off, look at the price chart. This is just a token that launched at the end of the last bull run, dumped on everybody, and then did nothing at all for about a year until some obviously manipulated pump came in and bought it up to try and fix the price chart. To me this is clear price manipulation. There was nothing real happening with it at all.
What exactly is this?
So what exactly is Onyxcoin? It's billed as Web3 blockchain infrastructure. If you go to their website, it says it's a layer 3. The pitch is that Onyx is a layer three blockchain designed for financial-grade applications, offering near-instant confirmation and low fees. Guess what already does this? Internet Computer Protocol. And guess what you don't have to bolt on when you use Internet Computer Protocol? A third-party wallet like MetaMask.
What I find absurd here is that this thing stacks layer twos. You've got Arbitrum and Base both in the mix. You know what's worse than gunking up your coin with one layer two? Doing it with two of them. In my opinion, I don't like Ethereum layer 2s to begin with, unless you can build the entire application on it the way you can with Internet Computer Protocol. To me they're just extracting value out of the Ethereum ecosystem, and I believe the whole Ethereum ecosystem suffers for it now, because all these layer 2s have pulled value off of it that generally does not come back to the chain. And here you can get two of them involved at once. That's a clear problem in my book.
No team, no faces, no accountability
Click the "about" page. Do they list any team members? Can you see who is actually behind this? Absolutely not. If you read the page, it says this is a decentralized project launched by a group of developers, fully open source, and developed by the community. I'm sure it is. I'm sure the X account is run by the community too, fully decentralized. No. There is some centralized person who controls this, who controls the website, and they have no accountability and no transparency.
These are huge red flags to me. In my experience, people who are confident and proud of what they're building are happy to show their faces and put their names on it. People who are lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, and committing fraud don't want their faces or names associated with the project, so they can keep lying and stealing from you and get away with it. And I've come to believe that's almost all of crypto.
This thing has a $1.5 billion fully diluted market cap with not a shred of value that I can see.
The social media is botted
If you look at the X account, in my view it's just more cheating and botting. There are 55,000 followers, and the account was created well after the coin was created. You'll see a "good morning" post with 25,000 impressions just for saying good morning. Who is really contributing to that? Scroll down deeper and you find posts with 12,000 impressions that don't have a single comment.
This is what I call the crypto mafia playbook. Make a website, put some pretty pictures and artwork on it, then use the same keywords I swear every other one of these projects uses to hook people who seem almost trauma-conditioned to respond to them. "Oh, real world assets. Real world assets, invest." Then you put bots on the social media to push it. Look at the comments and there's no real discussion. You see a couple of posts, you see people who haven't gotten their gas refunds complaining, and then you see a bunch of accounts with strings of numbers in their names, which to me is a typical sign of bots, all over the place.
It's gotten to the point where I feel like I could review these coins without even looking at them, because I know exactly what I'm going to see. My realistic price prediction is that this is going to zero. To me it's a worthless, fraudulent project created to take money from you while giving no real value to the world. Do we really need a layer three that you add MetaMask to? What good does that do?
The dead forum gives it away
Here's the tell. Look at the forums, where you don't usually see them cheating with bots. Almost every one of these cryptos sitting up in the market cap rankings blatantly cheats, and I guess it's just not obvious to most people. But look at how dead this forum is. There's almost no discussion about the actual project. They messed up by linking to their forums from the website, because now I've got them. This is the truth: 200 views on a post since April 2023.
For comparison, if you go check the forums on ICP, those forums are active and hot. People get into it, and there's all kinds of activity, and that's only about a three-times bigger market cap than this. Nobody cares about this project. Is there even a post about the actual product? You go to the topics and that's the whole forum. It's sloppy. It defaults into the crypto news category, and then it's just dead. This is the kind of sloppy stuff you've got to watch for.
And yet this project carries a $1.5 billion market cap while, in my opinion, they're out there defrauding people on X with bots, tricking people into buying it, building confirmation bias by circling the same hype over and over, saying good morning, and paying ambassadors on YouTube to talk about how great it is. It's not great. To me this is an easy way to dumpster-fire your money. You go to work, grind as a wage slave, then burn your money up handing it to somebody you don't even know. It's gross. It's clearly manipulated. People have already been rugged on this once, and there's no real technology behind it.
The holder counts don't impress me either
Then you look at the token holders. You've got 37,000 on Etherscan, but I'd bet it's not really 37,000 people. I think a lot of that is bots artificially inflating the holder count. Then you've got a few thousand holders on BaseScan and a few thousand on BscScan. For as big as this project claims to be, I'm not impressed with the number of holders, and I'd bet 99% of them are bots.
I've been in crypto 11 years. I'm tired of watching people get defrauded by these projects. People bring me coins to look at, and they'll say "well, this one looks great, why don't you check it out?" No. It sucks. I've looked at thousands of altcoins, and this one is terrible, just like almost every other altcoin people send my way.
What I actually hold and why
If you want to find a blockchain that isn't a pile of junk and is actually delivering real value to humanity, my website is hosted on the Internet Computer. It's literally on the blockchain. You can't do that with anything else. You can also join my OpenChat, which is an application like Discord or Telegram hosted entirely on the blockchain. You can't build that anywhere besides ICP. I try to stay transparent: these are my two biggest holdings, they're things you can use totally for free, every single day. That, to me, is what being ready for mass adoption actually looks like.
If you want to really get good at this, I'm not out here trying to sell you some $500 course. I'm putting the lessons up for free, and you can dig into more of my thinking on all of this in my Money playlist to get what you really need to know.