Little Shapes was a ‘social experiment’ to expose NFT botnets: founder

Atto, the pseudonymous founder behind Little Shapes NFT, has revealed that the project was actually a “social experiment” designed to shed light on large-scale nonfungible token (NFT) botnet scams on Twitter.

Since the end of December 2022, Little Shapes has attracted a lot of attention from the media and the crypto community. This is due to several semi-viral tweets describing events in the founder’s life that seemed too good to be true.

Examples include waking up from a five month coma, finding out he had assets locked up on FTX, telling his wife and then finding out she was cheating on him with other people in the NFT industry.

On a Twitter February 2nd threadHowever, the Little Shapes NFT account told its 30,800 followers: “thanks for participating everyone – Little Shapes was a social experiment by @BALLZNFT” and shared a link to a 158-page document.

“However, the exposure was real. Here’s how a ring of influencers and founders siphoned $200M+ out of the ecosystem across 274 projects,” Little Shape’s NFT wrote, adding:

“Over the last year, NFT Twitter has been manipulated and controlled mainly by a single Twitter botnet. It mostly appeared in February 2022, and was then used in conjunction with a network of influencers and alpha groups to sell projects .”

The document itself is titled “Insider the NFT bot network that has controlled the market behind the scenes.”

It claims that since February 2022, a large number of low-level NFT projects have deployed bot networks to artificially build hype and legitimacy, all in an attempt to attract investors.

Speaking to BuzzFeed News on February 2, Atto, also the founder of BALLZNFT, described Little Shapes as “performance art” and emphasized that “people don’t pay attention unless you give them a reason to.”

“I needed a story that sells to make sure no one would ignore a story that hurts,” he said.

The document points to bot networks, such as “Dmister,” that sell social media engagement as a key avenue for NFTs projects and only charge around $100 per 1,000 likes, retweets and replies.

The BALLZNFT team even used Dmister to promote Little Shapes NFT to give an example of how it works.

Once these projects succeed in building enough hype to get actual investors, they “get tapped or screwed, usually within a few months, and the people behind the project make $3 or $4 million,” Atto told BuzzFeed , adding that:

“What I found frustrating is that we’re in an area ranked entirely by social capital and fake Twitter engagement where nothing is real.”

Little Shapes was previously depicted as an upcoming avatar-style project featuring 4,444 NFTs that used a specific software “engine” to enable owners to interact and change the shape of the tokens’ associated artwork in real-time.

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BALLZNFT appears genuine, given that the NFT project had its first performance on February 3rd with token artwork showing references to the Little Shapes debacle.