A look at the characters behind the speculative shitcoin crypto scene, including promoters who can earn anywhere from $5K-$10K to hype a coin
38, unemployed and ticked off by watching other people get rich — figured, What the hell? and laid $500 on some crazy-sounding thing called ASS Coin. @business https://www.bloomberg.com/... Aly-Khan Satchu / @alykhansatchu : At times this might seems like a good old-fashioned pump-and-dump in penny stocks. In the crypto trade, the maneuver is known as a “rug pull.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... 08-FEB-2021 :: The Markets Are Wilding https://www.rich.co.ke/... Aly-Khan Satchu / @alykhansatchu : “It's insane,” Hackney kept thinking, “but it's reality.” 'It's DeFi ... It's BSC .... It's SUPERDOGE.' @business https://www.bloomberg.com/... “pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino bucks sure no problem bro.” https://www.rich.co.ke/... Aly-Khan Satchu / @alykhansatchu : ASS Coin: Australian Safe Shepherd one of those obscure virtual currencies that have YOLO'd & FOMO'd their way from crypto in-jokes to soaring — and now sinking — monuments to these strange financial times. https://www.bloomberg.com/... The Markets Are Wilding https://www.rich.co.ke/... @business : Meet the thrill-seeking amateurs prowling for profits in the wildest corners of the crypto market — all in search of the next big coin Read The Big Take ⬇️ https://www.bloomberg.com/... Aly-Khan Satchu / @alykhansatchu : In the unregulated world of DeFi, money buys influencers, who drive news cycles, which help pique interest, which drives up prices and trading volume. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Markets Are Wilding https://www.rich.co.ke/... @elonmusk I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts Aly-Khan Satchu / @alykhansatchu : The Creator — someone like this guy sitting in Thailand who just minted another digital will-'o-the-wisp, SuperDoge. https://www.bloomberg.com/... “Wow! What a Ride!” https://www.rich.co.ke/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after Bloomberg profiled the shitcoin scene — promoters paid $5K-$10K per hype job, an anonymous creator minting SuperDoge from nothing — this piece follows the money into the human machinery of it: figures like Hackney laying $500 on a token called ASS Coin, and traders like Aly-Khan Satchu reading it all as a crypto-native rerun of the old penny-stock pump-and-dump, rebranded as the "rug pull." The engine underneath is DeFi's unregulated plumbing, where money itself is used to pay influencers to manufacture interest and trading activity.
The timing matters: this ran days after Elon Musk demonstrated he could move Bitcoin and Dogecoin with a single post, showing that in this market attention is literally the price-setting mechanism — whether wielded by a celebrity or by a paid Telegram promoter. What reads as farce in May 2021 becomes the throughline for everything that follows: Sam Bankman-Fried later conceded that calling crypto yield-farming a "Ponzi" was "a pretty reasonable response," and the US case against alleged Mango Markets manipulator Avraham Eisenberg turned the same game-playing mindset into a federal matter.
First-order effects
- Paid promoters take home $5K-$10K per coin they hype, while retail buyers like Hackney absorb the downside when the pattern resolves as a rug pull — Satchu's penny-stock analogy made literal.
- Anonymous creators mint tokens like SuperDoge at zero cost and capture the upside of influencer-driven attention, with no accountability layer between mint and mark-up.
Second-order effects
- The exchange layer inherits the mess: Changpeng Zhao built Binance into the largest crypto exchange on exactly this trading activity, then spent the 2022 crypto winter navigating a regulatory crackdown aimed partly at it.
- When even insiders like Bankman-Fried publicly validate the "Ponzi" framing for yield-farming, credibility drains from adjacent legitimate products, forcing the industry to defend the boundary between speculation and fraud.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enforcement migrates from naming-and-shaming to prosecution — the Eisenberg case previews regulators treating meme-coin manipulation not as market eccentricity but as securities-style misconduct with real-world consequences.
- The structural outcome is a widening legitimacy gap: speculative mania periodically returns (the 2024 "Trump trade" Bitcoin rally past $89K), but each cycle leaves behind more prosecutions and more regulatory infrastructure around the casino.
The trend: Crypto's speculative fringe keeps recycling the same promoter-driven pump mechanics across cycles, and each cycle converts more of them from internet jokes into test cases for regulators.