shiro

4/ Then I found the BitClout Block Explorer https://explorer.bitclout.com/  Since the whole thing is on a public blockchain, the explorer lets you see every transaction/event that happened on BitClout Every coin purchase, every profile update, every follow/unfollow, everythingpic.twitter.com/WXs1BsaLtY

5/ What got me curious were things like how do they decide how much a "Creator" is worth? Who are these crazy ppl who has millions of $ in elon coin? Why can't ppl get their money out? How do I short $BitClout? So I went down the rabbit hole... (everything here is public info)pic.twitter.com/RyA2CmSePK

6/ First of all, the genesis block: https://explorer.bitclout.com/?query-node=https:%2F%2Fapi.bitclout.com&block-height=0 … Mined on Jan 18 5:42 UTC, Block 0 contains 1 transaction: BLOCK_REWARD That reward is a whopping 8 million $BitClout coin. By their own valuation, 1 coin is currently $144, so that's $1.15 Billion worth of pre-mine.pic.twitter.com/eQyEBPG89H

7/ The genesis block reward was split into 482 Public Keys A key is generated when you first signed up. If your profile is one of the ~15,000 they scraped from Twitter, it already has a key To claim your profile, you need to swap them by tweeting your key thereby promoting thempic.twitter.com/aB4wPGopca

8/ The reward was not split evenly. Some keys hold 100,000s of $BitClout while some only get 0.00001s Approx. 349 keys containing ~5.7 million $BitClout have not been touched since the genesis block The activities on the other 133 keys are where things get interesting...pic.twitter.com/yHmyT8ydBG

9/ There are 11 types of actions that get recorded on the blockchain Your average activity on the BitClout website mostly consists of these actions (listed as Transaction) However there are only certain Public Keys that could perform the bottom 3 actions (more on these later)pic.twitter.com/Tam3zVi8YY

10/ 42 days after the genesis block, on Mar 1 things finally got started: Block 1 to Block 2,389 were mined. In total there are 57,784 transactions recorded on these blocks What are these early transactions and why are there so many of them?pic.twitter.com/CSwQBKmTOw

11/ A closer look at these transactions show they mostly consist of: BASIC_TRANSFER, UPDATE_PROFILE and CREATOR_COIN Apparently this was how they populated empty public keys with 'influencer' profiles scraped from Twitter and pumped their market cappic.twitter.com/g1soOBXQy7

12/ Every time you perform an action such as updating your profile, posting comments or following people on BitClout, you are charged gas fees for the transactions to be recorded on the blockchain Fees for the above are minuscule BTC > $BitClout swap is 0.1% of the minted amountpic.twitter.com/PdmV3OPf6V

13/ On this early stage, all those empty keys went through 4 transactions - got sent a bit of $BitClout for gas - spent it to update profile as scraped from Twitter - got sent a larger amount - spent it to buy their own coin Check out Block 2 for example https://explorer.bitclout.com/?query-node=https:%2F%2Fapi.bitclout.com&block-height=2 …pic.twitter.com/PVIDAoSXXt

14/ Repeat the above 15,000 times and now you've got 15,000 'reserved' influencer profiles on BitClout The next step was to make the profiles look so valuable that the influencers would be enticed to claim theirs, thereby endorsing it What to do? Artificially pamp it of coursepic.twitter.com/oSCtzkml17

15/ On Mar 11 starting from Block 5529, a similar process of sending $BitClout to each profile so they could buy their own coin began This time the amount was larger but varied arbitrarily This is why every profile comes holding their own coin and why their value is artificialpic.twitter.com/fzKZL8dBTJ

16/ We could see from the block explorer that all those $BitClout that were distributed for updating profiles and pumping purposes came from the genesis block reward 2 genesis public keys were responsible for distributing the funds: Genesis Public Key #102 and #131pic.twitter.com/xc8C4WxNY5

18/ Out of the 133 genesis keys that have shown activities since Block 0, around half have updated their profiles and could now be browsed on the BitClout website - including Genesis #102 and #131 They are respectively called "master" and "merlin"pic.twitter.com/GWlkmp9PzE

20/ On the other hand merlin's job is to give out 0.00002 starter $BitClout to every new user that signed up - to pay gas fees for simple actions like updating profile or posting A quick Twitter search for 'merlin bitclout' brings up this tweet from the day of the second launchpic.twitter.com/Lgd6qN1EFm

22/ As previously mentioned, there are transactions dating from Mar 1 recorded on the 133 genesis public keys that contained ~2.3 million of the Block 0 reward By my last count, around 800k $BitClout have since been transferred out of the keys or spent on Creator coinpic.twitter.com/ONq4I3X3Qh

23/ Some genesis keys were emptied out - their $BitClout distributed to other keys For example, all 41k $BitClout in Genesis key #105 were sent to public key BC1YLhhjMfZBCFw(...) https://explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC1YLfzc73tyvGoHrktLWHy9NkD88JAGDmBLG9o6Eh3GgabyGBiDy7A&query-node=https:%2F%2Fapi.bitclout.com …pic.twitter.com/3siuUq9ADQ

24/ Other genesis keys used their pre-mined $BitClout to buy large amounts of Creator coin Genesis key #347 spent around 24k $BitClout on elon & naval coin, pumping their market cap in the process and is now the top holder of both their coins https://explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC1YLfhFEngGhnQEQH2mtiyQVZQVf3dpMxiPQykmJ2UsuAKGE18AfCT …pic.twitter.com/2P0knhvBiJ

25/ In fact, the top coin holders of the highest value Creators are mostly genesis public keys or accounts that have received pre-mined $BitClout from them charitee, who is in the top 5 coin holders of these Creators, is genesis key #244 who has updated their profilepic.twitter.com/xWZn3zRsJb

26/ These investors are all genesis public key owners with pre-mined $BitClout that have also updated their profiles chamath, who holds genesis public key #9, has 87.5k $BitClout from the Block 0 reward in his key https://explorer.bitclout.com/?public-key=BC1YLi4WxfmuDg7Dxzk1EFrtph11g95R9BZEaUe4BU49vPcn5Znavzp …pic.twitter.com/h8Haf4yqb0

27/ From what I've seen so far, genesis public keys that have updated their profiles are mostly investors and team members (including miners) Some use real profiles, others anon. There are even meme accountspic.twitter.com/uiN12ppMBJ

28/ Speaking of miners, 9,900 blocks have been mined so far Since launch day, the average block time is ~5 minutes Block reward is usually 1 $BitClout but can vary - the largest I've seen so far is 340 $BitClout for Block 3727 https://explorer.bitclout.com/?transaction-id=3JuETWDhAQxL39yUsBhxMruA4zrgxJyrLqpc1WZL2zxnLkkUjkX8yA …pic.twitter.com/f7GtQpNGLK

30/ Half of the miners are genesis public keys and some have updated their profiles Some even have already used the block rewards to buy creator coinspic.twitter.com/vxvF2U3uod