The Real GREED: From a copy-pasta to a 700k+ SOL validator and a dream
It happened again. Multimillion dollar memecoin frenzy scam season was back, and there I was scrolling through Twitter and wondering: Haven’t we learned anything from last time?
In this article I will explain what happened with “The Real $GREED Experiment” from first tweet to the moment thousands of people locked and staked their $SOL, and most importantly, present our plans for the future.
The history of The $GREED Experiment
As many of you know, The $GREED Experiment made some noise around May last year (2023), after thousands of Twitter accounts tweeted the same manifesto. $GREED ended on top of Twitter trending. If you’re not familiar with the original experiment, you can read about it more HERE.
A lot of eyes were on the experiment, and we used the opportunity to push as much education about security and privacy during that time, by publishing articles, Twitter content and being present in a lot of Twitter spaces.
The positive feedback was overwhelming. During the next few weeks I got over a hundred DMs of people thanking me, claiming they changed their opsec and started using better practices. During the last year, the number of people claiming they learned how to stay safer, in person or in DMs, rose to at least a few hundred. Now, you might say this is nothing compared to the number of involved people, but I felt very proud of what we managed to do. If we helped level up the security and privacy of a few hundred people, I consider that quite an achievement and feel all the time spent was worth it.
But, just like with everything else in crypto, majority of people forget quickly, and attention gets redirected elsewhere. Few months later, in August 2023 is when I understood a lot of people do still remember the experiment. Friend.tech platform launched and demanded Twitter write permissions from the users to even register. I was getting tagged dozens of time per day on Twitter by people mentioning The $GREED Experiment as either the reason they are not going to give out permissions, or as an example of why the platform should not be demanding this at all.
This situation reignited the motivation to do more for education in the space and try to find a sustainable way to keep people’s attention. It became clear that you either need a surprise element or an incentive to get people to care and listen. Clearly, producing surprise moments continuously isn’t really possible. Soon, an idea came to mind about way to incentivize people to learn and I tried to find a way to fund it. It ended up being more complicated than I felt it should have been, and with the increase in the work I had from the clients I work with, it was put on hold once again.
I still strongly felt that education is the only sustainable solution in pushing the crypto ecosystem forward and raising it above the status it currently holds in the outsiders’ eyes. Scams, rugs, drained wallets… People really do have reasons to look at us and think we’re just one big degen casino. The tech can never solve some of the fundamental issues that are in the way of meaningful change. Educating the participants of the space about privacy, security and many other important topics is the only way to achieve that change. And that’s the perfect segue into the new chapter…
What triggered The Real $GREED
In early March, even though the “shitcoin season” was already going on for a long time, something new started happening. Something that made it feel even worse than ever before. People called it “the presale meta”, and what it meant is that people would just post a wallet address on Twitter (often with a stupid comment like “don’t send SOL here”), and thousands of people would send SOL to the address expecting a proportional cut of the newly created memecoin to be airdropped to the same wallet they sent SOL from.
It got very dumb very quickly. In just a few days what became normalized is for this to work with no timeline, no tokenomics, no explanation, no details, NO NOTHING. ZachXBT covered some of this in his tweets, and still some of the biggest “raises” happened AFTER this:
In the first 33 presales that he covered at the time, OVER 150 MILLION DOLLARS was sent to the addresses these “big” accounts posted on Twitter. At the time most of them didn’t even launch a token yet, and the ones that were already launched were mostly “under” the presale value. This fact still didn’t stop the people from continuing that practice, with some examples weeks later ending with over 200,000 SOL at the posted addresses.
This was the first time since August and friend.tech that I started getting dozens of tags per day on Twitter. Most comments were remembering how last year $GREED marked the end of the craze and were calling for it again, others just kept saying how new people need a lesson. It was clear that people do still remember the experiment in the situations when the space starts feeling a bit too dumb to handle.
How it started
Once again, I didn’t really have a plan. I thought it would be funny if I just copy pasted the same first tweet from last time to remind everyone and share some laughs with people. Few people got it, most didn’t. Just as last time. So again to try and make sure this is clearly satire, I decided to replicate, in the exact same order, the next 2 tweets from last year. Then I asked DS and SoftMoney to replicate exact tweets that I retweeted, so I can do that again. This went on for 2 more tweets.
The engagement on these tweets seemed crazy again. And it clearly wasn’t from people understanding what’s going on. At this point people were already DMing me left and right asking if this time “the $GREED is real”.
Understanding that we can probably capture the attention once again and share some lessons, I finally decided to play along. Thinking in the worst case we can do the same thing again, but just call the token “The Real $GREED”, I put myself in the position to respond to those people with “this time the $GREED is Real”. And, unsurprisingly, this was more than enough for the craziness to start, again.
The plan in the making
Now I really didn’t want to just repeat the same thing again, it seemed too low effort, and like it won’t be able to capture the same level of attention, which then defeats the purpose. As I mentioned before, capturing people’s attention by a big “reveal” surprise moment is doable, but I felt like incentive is what needs to follow if we want to keep people’s attention for more than a few weeks or even days.
This combined with the main trigger this time being “the presale meta”, lead to the first idea about using staking as a part of the experiment this time. We wanted to “shake” the people that were ready to send SOL to random Twitter addresses and probably never seeing any of that SOL again, hoping they put some more thought into it in the future. We of course never wanted to take custody of people’s assets in any way, shape or form. The only solution that came to mind was - what if people just stake that SOL they would send instead?
This lead me to a lot of research I never did before, mainly focused on Solana validator profitability, priority fees, commission and so on. I quickly learned that validators with a lot of stakes have been very profitable lately, mainly because of priority fees that have never before been as high. Big validators with as high as 7% commission were making more money from block rewards than from commission!
This research made me realize two things:
- I want to teach people about validators and staking
- A successful validator might be a way to fund education that seemed out of reach before
Would people delegate their stake to a validator that commits to using all of these profits to fund education compared to validator operator just getting all of that money? We hoped so, but still believed that for this to even get inside the people’s radars, starting with that big surprise moment that makes the headlines, seems like the perfect way to capture attention. To achieve that, having people just stake for 1 epoch wasn’t going to cut it. But if their SOL is locked for a while? That will surely make some noise.
The next part of the plan became very obvious as soon as the idea about locking came to mind: Giving the lockup authority to a DAO where all the participants have a vote is a perfect opportunity to also teach people about the basics of on-chain governance.
Finally, the only thing missing was the future longer-term incentive part of the equation. This time we wanted the “reveal” to be the start of something great, compared with the last time where it was practically the end of the experiment. We understood we need to find a way to get the people that start paying attention because of the surprise moment to become interested in staying around and learning.
Plan puzzles falling into place
So, to summarize, at this point we have the outline of the plan:
- Run a validator that will use any eventual profits towards funding educational initiatives
- Let people lock and stake their SOL and teach them about staking and validators
- Show people how to unlock their SOL by learning the basics of using on-chain governance on Solana
- Try to incentivize people to not unlock, but to stay and learn instead
Let’s go through these steps to understand how we ended up doing that.
1. Run a validator that funds education
After a lot of research and talking with dozens of people, I understood this is not an easy task. Most people that offered to help run a validator were demanding extreme amounts of money for their services which would mean that if we don’t get hundreds of thousands of SOL staked on it, we would be constantly losing money. Even if we did extremely well, these operators would be making way more than we could put into education.
This changed when I finally talked to amazing people from triton.one. Steve and Brian listened to my idea and without skipping a beat said they would be ready to contribute all of the net proceeds towards our educational initiative. Not only were they not interested in any cut from the potential future profits, they even took the upfront risk, covering the costs of both the hardware and the voting. I can’t thank them enough for being so amazing and I’m happy to call them partners on this initiative. I know I will be shilling Triton for a long time and I invite everyone who has any RPC or validator needs to hit them up.
2. Let people lock and stake
To create the moment of surprise and shock, we wanted to let people who were ready to send their SOL without any timelines or explanations to stake their SOL and lock it for a while.
Amazing developer duo of Prasko and Marcos came through, just as last time, setting up everything needed on the technical side for this to work. A website people can connect to and “deposit”, a smart contract that issued new frozen tokens, a transaction served to people in a way where all they are really doing with their SOL is creating a locked staking account and staking it to a validator, meaning SOL never actually leaves their wallets or their custody. Thank you both very much for making this happen.
To make sure everything runs smoothly, we needed some capable and unlimited RPC nodes. QuickNode came to the rescue, just like last time, and provided their infra for free in support.
Of course, what was also important was the messaging that was going out. The goal was to really “target” only the people ready to send SOL “into the void”, without any questions asked, while still never telling a lie. I want to thank Dylan and Dani for being my brainstorm buddies and wasting a lot of time checking everything I was putting out.
3. Show people how to unlock
During the last year I spent some more time hanging out with people that are deeply into DAOs and on-chain governance, and started to appreciate it as one of the rare use cases where blockchain already really shines. One of the defining moments of this was the amazing AthensDAO conference I had the pleasure of attending. Teaching more people about governance was in my mind since that moment, and giving the lockup authority to a DAO to let people decide about unlocks seemed like a great way to do it.
Naturally, I reached out to the Realms team to see if they can help make this possible. It became clear there is some work needed to be done on their side to make my idea come true. Governance with frozen tokens was never used before, and the unlock instruction required a custom code block to execute. They accepted the challenge and are at the moment finalizing all the updates needed for people to be able to easily make unlock proposals for their staking accounts. Thank you Dean, Sebastian and the rest of the team!
4. Incentivize people to stay and learn instead of unlocking
Finally we come to the one thing we did not mention before, which is the final step of the plan. And the most exciting one! In parallel with teaching people how they can unlock their stake accounts, we will announce the reward fund for everyone that decides to leave their SOL locked and staked until Breakpoint (September 20th, 2024), and learn some cool things. We are finalizing the deals with several partners that want to support the initiative and donate tokens, SOL, USDC or even something else to the DAO, to be shared between everyone that makes the “right” choice!
Apart from announcing the initial set of partners, we will also publish a the public wallet of the DAO that anyone can donate to, and all the funds will be going towards rewarding the people that pick education over unlocking. More details about how this will work are going to be published soon! (And don’t worry, you will be able to join in on the fun even if you didn’t participate in The Experiment yet)
The “deposit day”
The original idea was for the big day to happen around April 9th. Sadly, Solana network was experiencing a tough few weeks, with very high latency and big problems with landing transactions. Being afraid of the whole plan going badly if we move forward under those conditions, we decided to postpone.
Finally, a few weeks later, with the network condition improving, we decided to move forward. On May 2nd, we opened the website where people can “deposit” their SOL. As explained, the transaction they were signing after connecting their wallets was creating a locked staking account, with the unlock date of September 20th, and delegating it to our validator.
People also had a chance to optionally give out their Twitter write permissions again, which we were showing a “multiplier” next to.
No explanation was ever given about the “multiplier” or what the expectations from people depositing their SOL should be.
The site was live about 1 hour in the original form. During that time 1,527 locked staking accounts were created, holding a combined 6,220 SOL.
The website was then changed to clearly indicate what the expected result from signing the transaction is and the new manifesto was tweeted through accounts that gave us the write permissions.
This year the manifesto looked like this:
Sadly, our Twitter API got banned after only 500 tweets compared to tens of thousands last year. The impact on Twitter was hugely diminished because of this. Considering we paid for the API, it’s quite shocking that Twitter still provided no explanation and has no way of actually raising a complaint about the ban. Luckily for us, this time the experiment got some people triggered enough that their tweets helped with the engagement and capturing the attention to the experiment in a big way.
The $GREED Experiment validator
After the “reveal”, we explained publicly the long term idea is funding educational initiatives if we manage to make our validator profitable.
Our validator is currently taking 0% commission on staking rewards. This means ALL of the rewards are going directly back to the users that stake with our validator.
On the reveal day, over 300 SOL was undelegated from our validator from the locked accounts before the epoch change, meaning it never even activated. This was followed buy around 1,000 more undelegated SOL in the next two epochs. We even explained on Twitter everyone can freely move validators they delegate to, and we can’t force anyone to stay staked with us. We wouldn’t want to even if we could.
At the same time, during those two epochs, 30,000 SOL was delegated to our validator by people who liked the idea and wanted to support the validator. So already 3 epochs later, we had over 35,000 delegated SOL, and the locked accounts were less than 15% of the validators stake.
We are now 8 epochs from the initial reveal. We are proud to say that our validator now has over 735,000 SOL staked to it. At the current price of SOL, this is over 125 million dollars.
We are hoping we can keep the attracted stake for a long time, which would allow us to actively fund educational initiatives, be it our own or by other amazing people in the ecosystem!
If you are interested in staking with our validator where all of the potential block rewards profits are used to fund education, you can find it by the name “The $GREED Experiment”, or by it’s address:
What happens next
While the Realms team is polishing everything needed to make creating unlock proposals easy for everyone, we are finalizing the deals with initial partners that wanted to support the initiative by funding what we call the “$GREED DAO incentive fund”.
Anyone who decides not to unlock and instead to learn while keeping their stake locked and delegated to our validator until Breakpoint, will share everything from that fund!
For now, we want to give a big shoutout to some of the partners that are onboard and already sent their contributions to The $GREED Experiment DAO:
- Samoyedcoin - the first Solana memecoin, aiming to promote and educate the next generation of crypto users on Solana, leveraging the cultural power of memes and crypto integrations. Facilitating education and personal connections, it focuses on sustainable growth and engagement through partnerships and integrations within the Solana ecosystem. Samoyedcoin contributed 2,5M $SAMO (current market value of $20,000!)
- Marms - one of the cutest NFT collections on Solana which fosters high-quality partnerships in the SOL ecosystem, aiming to benefit holders with value through strong community bonds, exclusive merch, and the upcoming child-friendly mobile game. Marms contributed $10,000 worth of SOL plus 50 Marms NFTs!
- Texture - the leading peer-to-peer lending protocol on Solana with the mission to advance the decentralized lending and money markets space, to make it more risk balanced, accessible and safe. Texture contributed 10,000 USDC!
- Famous Fox Federation - one of the oldest Solana NFT communities that has built a fascinating ecosystem. Headlined by the popular P2P NFT trading platform, FoxySwap, all FFF tools and utilities were created with the average user’s safety and convenience in mind. FFF contributed 2,400 FFF Treasure Chests (current market value of $10,000!)
- Racket - a SocialFi token created to decentralize the value share of social engagement, planning to revolutionize any brand’s ability to reward their communities for creating content with their upcoming launch of the “Brand Kit” app. Racket contributed 6.9M $RKT (current market value of $6,900!)
- Cyber Frogs - an OG Solana NFT trading community. As developers of THOR, a powerful trading suite, they are pioneering the DeFi trading space, allowing their community to utilize the protocol across multiple markets and manage their portfolios fully automatically or manually. CF contributed 55K $KIRA (current market value of $5,000!) and 10 Whale 6–week THOR access passes (each valued at around $2,000!)
The announcement explaining how everyone can go about unlocking their locked stake accounts, and how will the incentive fund be split between everyone who decides to stay and learn should be live soon. We might confirm a few more initial partners during the next few days. We will also publish the DAO wallet for anyone willing to donate to the incentive fund.
Our dream is a long term ability to promote and fund education for the years to come. Having a top performing validator that allows users to stake and earn top tier staking rewards while also knowing that any operator profits are being put to a good cause, seems like a novel idea that might allow us to do just that.
If you want to be a part of this dream and support the initiative, you can do so by either simply staking with our validator, or donating to our DAO wallet incentive fund. Make sure to follow our upcoming announcements!
Thank you so much for reading, hopefully this answers a lot of the questions we’ve been getting and makes people understand why we did it.
If you made it this far, it means something in this article resonated with you and you want to be a part of this movement. Don’t miss out on what is coming, and while you are at it, be greedy, stake your SOL!
