‘ShameFi’ takes over Crypto Twitter

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Have you ever felt ashamed selling off a large sum of tokens for fiat currency? Or does it just feel good to take profits? Shaming others for their exits has become a thing on Crypto Twitter this week. So much so, in fact, that some traders have started calling the movement “ShameFi.”

ShameFi as a trend originated from the Kaito token claiming event, which happened this week and left some X users with piles of tokens worth hundreds of dollars for just a handful of tweets (like me). Others got six-figure sums—and promptly traded those Kaito tokens for cash. 

Nansen AI CEO Alex Svanevik is one of a few crypto executives outing Kaito sellers on Twitter. He’s been posting links to Nansen charts, showing that Ethereum activist Anthony Sassano is among Kaito’s biggest sellers, among others. “NO MORE YAPS FOR YOU—NOT ALIGNED,” he wrote in one post in all-caps.

Crypto exchange Arkam and Head of Base and Coinbase Wallet Jesse Pollack have also been outing or “shaming” Kaito sellers (Kaito’s token is on Base).

“I think it’s lame to celebrate immediately divesting of long term builders who are rewarding us for our contributions and using tokens to bring us in as cobuilders,” Pollack said in response to a tweet from NFT influencer and Dastan President Farokh Sarmad, who sold his tokens and thanked the team for the “stimmy.”

“I think it’s net-negative for our culture to celebrate short-term, mindset-driven selling,” Pollack wrote in a separate post on Thursday.

Later, he clarified his stance: “It’s fine to sell your airdrop. Taxes, rent, bills, making your life better. All good and all within your rights. Economic freedom. What I think is less positive is celebrating selling immediately. Particularly over the last 12 months, CT and this space has increasingly focused on who can make money fastest.”

Others, like Web3 builder Jordan Feinstein, don’t believe in ShameFi as it’s not an effective tactic to actually get would-be sellers to believe in what you’re building.

“Shamefi is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of in this space. For real. If you don’t want people to sell your token, they need to believe there’s more upside to holding it than selling it. If they don’t believe that, IT’S ON YOU, not them,” he wrote.

My two cents? Crypto is such a high-risk, volatile space, that you have to do what’s right for your financial situation. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer as to whether you should sell something immediately or risk waiting something out. 

I’m not trying to play the long game with Kaito—and I’m not that much of a yapper—so I swapped the tokens I got for Bitcoin. Kaito’s been pumping since. Oh well.

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