How do top meme KOLs make money? An analysis of Ansem’s “shipping behavior”

On October 5, Andrew Kang, co-founder and partner of crypto venture capital firm Mechanism Capital, posted on social media, "It looks like @MustStopMurad's speech at Token2049 catalyzed the next wave of capital reallocation into Meme coins." The comment section of this tweet sparked a lot of discussion, and the chain detective ZachXBT and trading KOL Ansem also sparked a debate because of this statement.

The focus of the debate is on their views on their respective roles and behaviors. ZachXBT accused Ansem of frequently promoting small-cap currencies through his huge fan base, causing many people to lose money due to blindly following the trend, and even called it "cutting leeks". Ansem countered that he was only choosing the best trades on the market, and said that as a trader, he could not ensure that every trade would be successful, but he helped more people than he hurt.

Related reading: "Latest interview with top KOL Ansem: This is the best cycle since I entered the circle | In-depth interview"

ZachXBT claims to have made substantial contributions to the crypto community by solving hacker problems, helping to arrest criminals, and recovering victims' funds, helping people avoid KOL "traps" like Ansem. Ansem believes that ZachXBT's accusations of his behavior are exaggerated, and that the claim of promoting hundreds of coins is not true. "We can talk about meme coins all day, but you know I've helped far more people than I've hurt on this platform, so let's stop here."

The debate ended with Ansem saying, "If I could hit 100% accurately, I would have been the god of the earth. It's pointless to criticize me for some of the falling coins I mentioned, especially when the entire altcoin market is falling."

The following content comes from the analysis of Ansem's tweets by crypto KOL@dethective, combined with the price trend of the meme coins he called, to prove whether Ansem really dumped meme coins to his fans. BlockBeats has also previously analyzed and summarized Ansem's transaction addresses.

Related reading: "From the top meme KOL to the loss of Ma Wuyu, why is Ansem no longer effective? "

Many people witnessed the wonderful debate between @zachxbt and @blknoiz06. This raises a key question: Is Ansem really dumping small-cap tokens to his followers? I analyzed more than 40,000 tweets to uncover the truth.

Ansem’s Average Return

If you bought each token when it was first mentioned, your average return would be about 150%. The top performing tokens were:

$WIF: +5,300%

$BONK: +1,243%

$MOTHER: +867%

Sounds amazing, right? Not really.

When we look at the median return, it drops to -55%.

The reason for this discrepancy is that 33 of the 45 tokens have negative returns, with more than half of the tokens down 50% or more.

Every token that Ansem actually backed showed 100% positive returns, an analysis that aligns with @MustStopMurad’s popular sentiment: when Ansem has faith in a project and backs it for the long term, it tends to have a net positive impact on the industry. The correlation between the number of tweets and project performance is also very clear.

This isn’t just bragging: this is about conviction. On the other hand, the tokens that Ansem only mentioned 1-2 times all showed 100% negative returns. Classic pump and dump behavior.

Methodology

Scraped over 40k tweets.

Wrote code to identify token promotions by detecting relevant characters after the '$' symbol.

Recorded the date when each token was first mentioned.

Captured its price action.

My Personal Opinion

I initially conducted this analysis to support Zach in the debate. However, I try to be objective and therefore hope to fairly assess Ansem's point of view.

The key question is: "Is it unethical to promote a project with a low market cap to a large number of followers?"

My conclusion is: it is not the market cap that matters, but the long-term commitment. It is unethical to abandon a project after just one tweet. But if you really want to support it for a long time, it is understandable.

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