Who is Ben, who raised $6.9 million through memecoin?

Written by: wale.swoosh

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Ben is a recently emerged legend in the crypto world, who transformed from a relatively insignificant NFT player to a community leader raising $6.9 million in just 72 hours. How did he do it?

In the past few days, Ben has arguably become one of the most controversial figures in the Twitter crypto circle. He launched the BEN token and collaborated with BitBoy Crypto, and also initiated one of the largest presales of the current "meme summer."

Who is Ben?

Since May 2021, Ben has been active in the NFT space, with his first NFT purchase being "Siren of Glass" by Ola Volo.

Since then, Ben has been an active member of the NFT community, having held BAYC and Moonbirds, but parted ways with them after the CC0 public controversy. At that time, he was not yet influential.

He occasionally discussed events happening in the Web3 space on Twitter, but his voice was not loud. He was also not involved in any major scandals or controversies.

His influence on Inspect was negligible for a long time, but all of that was about to change…

Meme Summer

With the rise of PEPE and the memecoin frenzy, Ben changed his usual approach, starting to tweet frequently and promote memecoins relentlessly.

This promotion attracted a large number of participants, and the PEPE community was very strong. Many others in the field were doing the same, Pepe = engagement, promoting hundreds of times a day.

Ben's story could have ended here, with an insignificant KOL turning into a memecoin shiller, just like we have seen in the past few weeks.

Launching BEN

Possibly inspired by PEPE, Ben launched his own memecoin: BEN, raising 55 ETH from 329 wallets during the presale phase. This achievement was unremarkable, and BEN did not seem very promising, as the token showed a downward trend after its launch. Ben continued to tweet more to promote his token, all in uppercase, but to no avail.

Once again, the story could have ended: someone launched a token, and the token went to zero.

But a turning point occurred when this happened on May 8:

BEN then surged dramatically. Bitboy continued to tweet in support of BEN and officially joined the "team" on May 9:

Although Ben had promised that BEN was the project of his life, he handed it over to Bitboy in less than 72 hours.

Not only that, just a few hours later, Ben announced his new project…

PSYOP Presale

On that day, Ben released the PSYOP presale announcement. At the outset, he leveraged the success of BEN to gain reputation.

Within an hour, he raised over a million dollars. By the end of the presale, a total of $6.9 million was raised.

He then posted more all-uppercase tweets, and the massive success of the presale had all of crypto Twitter talking about him. This, in turn, led to more FOMO.

No matter how you view Ben, he is a master of the attention game. He used the fundraising wallet for PSYOP to buy a Milday, which shocked the community: "He is using the presale funds for personal consumption."

In my opinion, he could have used another wallet; but he didn't, which might be another strategy to attract attention.

Happy Ending?

The question is whether the ending of this story will be a Happy Ending or a complete disaster? I lean towards the latter, as there are almost no signs that this will succeed.

For the success of BEN, Ben sees it as proof of his own abilities, but the success of BEN may largely be attributed to Bitboy's involvement and influence. Ben's achievement was connecting with Bitboy.

The attention game will eventually come to an end, as many precedents in NFTs and memecoins have shown. Attention will shift sooner or later. Ben could buy 10 more Miladies, but the crypto market will eventually forget him at some point, it always does. Ben and his presale's greatest advantage is leveraging attention, but that may also be the reason for their eventual downfall.

Regardless, Ben's story will go down in history. It once again shows that the crypto world is about attention, and sometimes the dice fall in unexpected ways.