Snakes in the Metagrass 🐍

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

Degen tactics that make gambling look tame. How NFT projects are weaponizing your time to sell their NFT

Featuring https://twitter.com/ZenjinViperz
http://discord.gg/zenjinviperz

#iamzenjin #youarezenjin #wearezenjin — say it back

If you’re in the Twitter space, you must have heard about Zenjin Viperz

After all, your followers are constantly sharing only good things about them.

But here’s the dirty secret your friends won’t say. They are a “gladiator.”

glad·i·a·tor

In ancient Rome, a man trained to fight with weapons against other men or wild animals in an arena.

Tiers:

Gladiator = fight

Zenjin = fight

Zenjin elite = you may mint.

In ZenjinViperz, you are a participant who can fight for the right to enter the discord server. *fight, in this case, means fight for twitter likes and retweet retweets.

The user role “gladiator” lets you do nothing more than use emojis and read posted notices. You cannot mint (that is, create) a Zenjin Viperz NFT without having the role for it. You must become “Zenjin Elite.”

But that’s only after becoming “Zenjin” You must also fight for that role.

You are a fighter in a ring, fighting for the amusement of the discord moderators.

Moderators that are unfair as they are lazy, Lying as they are inhumane

and above all, turning the fun of minting an NFT into a month-long catastrophe.

I am both a Gladiator and Zenjin Elite. I am both fighting in the arena and watching people fight. I will never become elite as a Zenjin Gladiator, and I will never use my Zenjin Elite role to mint.

But I will let others know about the unfair practices being used.

NFT’s used to be fun.

You minted a cool photo, and maybe you could sell it for a little more.

A few months later, NFTs have ballooned into rug-pulls and scams, with the true gams being lost in the wake as degens jump from one project to the next.

Then came waitlists.

At first, they were legitimate methods to prevent bots from minting all the rare items and then reselling them. However, in a short time, waitlists became a gateway toward minting.

To mint, you must first obtain a certain role. Next, you must become Zenjin Elite. What gives you that role? For some servers, it’s time spent. Others have no rules in place at all, with moderators monitoring chat and picking at random.

And then you have projects like Zenjin Vipers.

These projects are after hype with no care for your sanity.

Most servers let you speak, but Zenjon doesn’t even dare to care enough to let you talk. So you’re limited only to emoji as a lowly gladiator.

Whitelist will only be obtained through community engagement.

Says their bot. Their bot isn’t programmed right and displays this message for lowly gladiators, informing them they must fight, fight, FIGHT for the elusive role, with a notice meant for Zenjin.

Whitelist will only be obtained through community engagement.

Grinding and spamming random messages will not work in your favor. To skew the odds in your favor and increase your chances submit works in #fan-art and check in the #giveaway channel.

Community engagement. That’s what they call it.

“raids” or “social takeover” are other names.

Here’s the true meaning.

Want to become a Zenjin!?

Go bug the absolute shit out of your Twitter friends.

Mods are watching, and they are monitoring for one reason only. To see what users get the most retweets. And even this, they do very poorly, as one person who obtained 23 re-tweets is still a lowly gladiator.

Every day Zenjin posts that it’s “time to fight.”

Grinding and spamming random messages will not work in your favor, yet that’s exactly what they want you to do. So spam the message to everyone on Twitter. Get them to become a gladiator. Do this enough times, and maybe you will become able to get a role that lets you do nothing else except access another tier of bullshitttery.

It is weaponized engagement — targeted spam. Shill enough times, and moderators might bring you a higher level if they notice ..or follow through on their promises.

I am letting 1000 of you, though!

Two hundred sixteen people later, the channel vanished. A message was posted that they would let 500 more through “later,” and no single post was made other than more calls for community engagement.

Another tactic was “The Button”

Every ???? amount of time (30 mins) you could click the button which would give a chance to award “Zenjin” role. Remember, this does NOT allow you to mint. Just encouraging people to come and click a button that if they won would allow them to fight for the right to mint some more.

Zenjin pretended to care for your metal health with a channel called “mental health” but the channel was hardly even moderated. People who used it for it’s pretentsive purpose were ignored.

You might wonder how I”m a Zenjin Elite able to mint. Or why do I have no interest in using my role and how I’m still a gladiator?

Two discord accounts with a VPN let me see both sides of the world.

I searched Twitter using advanced search with a parameter of following account Zenjin yet no tweets in the past week. In other words, who is following the account but not shilling for them? Then I sent a simple message offering cold hard crypto in exchange for an invite. 20 mins later, I was inside.

But I wasted my gold because I have no interest in minting this project.

I don’t support methods that abuse people’s time, and I’m writing this for the following reasons.

I want marketplaces to take note and issue demands that servers can’t do this. Because turning an NFT mint into a grind, where people are starting to hire other people to get waitlist.. is pathetic at minimum and life draining at best.

Marketplaces should delist projects that act this way, and I’m ashamed to have even touched the project.

Because unchecked, this type of community farming will grow. It will fester and boil, increasing in difficulty and moderator imagined tiers, doing nothing but squeezing people from the time they have on this earth to shill another NFT.