Today, crypto Twitter was on fire as new allegations came to light. In a series of tweets, @ZachXBT highlighted some trades tied to an Ethereum address that supposedly belongs to a well-known crypto influencer and Youtuber. Lark Davis, who has been accused of using his following to further his monetary gain over the years, amassed a large following on social media (more than 1 million on Twitter and just shy of 500k on YouTube).
So What Went Down?
ZachXBT elaborated on how he found which Ethereum address belongs to Lark Davis and then wrote an in-depth analysis of trades, providing exact dates, token amounts, and dollars profited from the works the wallet executed in the past. He gave eight instances when this wallet address dumped the tokens it received just a few moments before completing massive sell orders.
Supposedly, Lark Davis was tweeting about these projects, exciting his followers, pushing the price up while selling the tokens simultaneously. The tokens in question are $APY, $XED, $BMI, $PMON, $BLES, $SHOPX, $DOWS, and $UMB, with dates ranging between December 2020 and November 2021.
Across all these sales, the total profit in USD value is more than 1.2 million.
The hard part in affairs like this is finding a correlation between the Ethereum wallet address and its owner. One thing is sure: whoever is the wallet owner in question knew what they were doing, and their timing was impeccable; the sales coincide perfectly with Lark Davis’s tweets, YouTube, and blog mentions. Most tokens sold in large chunks are now below the price that the wallet was selling them for, and some were even confirmed as rug pulls or abandoned projects.
ZachXBT, who has a substantial following of his own with close to 300k Twitter followers, is no stranger to doing these types of posts, and he frequently calls out many other influencers. His pinned tweet is one example, where he tracked and confronted many people behind Discord hacks that occurred in late 2021.
Pump and Dumping
Using your followers to pump your bags is also nothing new, but it was more popular at the peak of the cryptocurrency bull run in 2021. It is also safe to say that it is certainly not going away any time soon since there will always be bad actors that view their following as exit liquidity. Many have been accused of similar wrongdoings in the past. CoffeZilla, another prominent YouTuber who primarily focuses on projects that rug pulled, did similar research on wallets connected to SafeMoon token and exposed their founders in a recent YouTube video.
So what can we make of this?
This is the famous privacy issue of blockchain technology that works like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, transactions on the blockchain are anonymous, and it is straightforward to get away with such shenanigans. On the other hand, once a wallet is tied to your name, anyone can see all past transactions you ever made. This is where the term “the blockchain doesn’t lie” originated.
So far, Lark Davis did not yet respond to these allegations. Ignoring it is usually not the way to go, so it will be interesting to see if he denies the allegations or posts a public apology for his behavior. Events like these are usually not career-ending but can seriously damage someone’s reputation.
