This multi-millionaire went from being a small NFT influencer to raising $6.9 million in 72 hours

by James · May 15, 2023

This multi-millionaire went from being a small NFT influencer to raising .9 million in 72 hours

Quick take:

ETH_Ben (his pseudonymous Twitter handle) raised $6.9 million in 72 hours.
Before then he was a relatively unknown NFT influencer.
Wale Swoosh documents the entire timeline of events and uncovers one of the crypto industry’s final mysteries.

The meme coin has been racing lately with Milady and PEPE starring in the recent rally. As such, it was inevitable that a few degenerates were going to take advantage of the latest market buzz.

One such person who benefited from this frenzy is the pseudonym ETH_Ben, who went from being a small NFT influencer to raising $6.9 million in 72 hours.

On-chain researcher Wale.Swoosh dived in to uncover the narrative of Ben’s activity that led to his huge windfall.

According to Wale, Ben has been actively involved in the NFT space for about two years now. He bought his first NFT an artwork by Ola Volo: “Siren of Glass” in May 2021. Since then he has been a member of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Moonbirds.

His involvement in the latter did not end well, based on a tweet he posted on March 25, 2023.

Proof/Moonbirds had such a good chance of being a hit. Instead they held their holder with very little respect and it just doesn’t fly in web3. We see you. I’d be worried about a lawsuit if I were @kevinrose, @JustinMezzellor anyone else involved.

— ben.eth (@eth_ben) March 25, 2023

Although Ben has tweeted about various NFT projects on and off, Wale.Swoosh, who referenced statistics from the popular NFT influencer analysis platform NFTinspect, reckons he was never seen as a big voice.

However, it is obvious that something has changed in recent days, when you look at the trajectories of the two baskets.

Being unpopular didn’t stop Ben from stumbling in when the opportunity presented itself.

In the midst of the meme coins powered by $PEPE and Milady coins, the relatively unknown NFT influencer decided to launch his own meme coin, $BEN.

He started by drumming up support for $PEPE on Twitter. Tweeting in CAPS, Ben optimistically backed PEPE to flip Shiba Inu and Dogecoin tokens in the meme coin charts. And because PEPE was already a popular meme coin, it helped with engagement, which of course drew more eyes to his timeline.

Wale.Swoosh believes the high engagement of his tweets is what inspired Ben to launch $BEN, with the pre-sale netting 55 ETH from 329 wallets. That’s about $100,000, so his big break hadn’t come yet.

However, on May 8, $BEN caught the attention of a crypto-influencer BitBoy_Crypto, whose tweet about the meme coin “added relevance”.

And as of May 9, BitBoy had already joined the $BEN coin team, adding that a third member would soon join the new team of two.

Little did BitBoy know that Ben had other plans. After 72 hours the team of two was back to a team of one, this time Ben gave the $BEN project to BitBoy.

A few hours later, Ben announced his new project $PSYOP, with the pre-sale also launching on the same day. The project raised more than $1 million within an hour and a total of $6.9 million by the end of the presale.