Original - Odaily
Author - Azuma
On November 4, local time in the United States, Elon Musk’s xAI team released its first large AI model product-Grok.
As the most popular target in the Crypto industry, Musk’s big move this time will naturally not be missed by various speculators. Within just one week after the release of Grok, major Layer 1 and Layer 2 companies have already Hundreds of GROK tokens with the same name have emerged.
Among the many GROK tokens with the same name, the GROK with the contract address 0x8390a1DA07E376ef7aDd4Be859BA74Fb83aA02D5 on Ethereum (as a distinction, all subsequent GROKs refer to this token) finally broke through and became the one with the largest trading volume and the highest popularity in the current Crypto market. One of the targets of speculation.
GROK is a pure meme token. The project temporarily designed the logo and website page based on the concept of xAI, and placed the token contract in a prominent position. As of the time of publishing, GROKs official X account has 15,000 followers, and the Telegram channel currently has more than 13,000 followers.
GROK was deployed on the same day that Grok went online (November 4), with a total supply of 6.9 billion (Note: 69 and 420 are Musk’s favorite numbers).After creating the token,The developers of GROK immediately added 5.016 billion GROK and 1 ETH to the Uniswap V2 pool as the initial liquidity pool.
Based on the price of ETH of approximately US$1,900 on November 4, the initial circulation price of GROK is approximately US$0.00000038, the price can also be queried through the historical data provided by Dex Screener.
According to the Bitget market,After more than a week of speculation and pursuit, GROK once rose to about 0.025 USDT on the evening of November 13. This price has increased by about 65,000 times from its initial circulation price.
This was supposed to be a day for the GROK community to celebrate the harvest, but the carnival sound came to an abrupt end with a tweet.
At 23:59 on November 13, ZachXBT, a well-known on-chain detective who has exposed many scams, said,GROK was created by scammers because the projects official X account (ID: 1690060301465714692) has been reused in at least one scam.
Affected by ZachXBTs investigation, the price of GROK plunged rapidly, reaching as low as around $0.0087, a drop of more than 65% from the highest point.
In response to ZachXBT’s accusations, the developers of GROK quickly responded through official Telegram channel, X Space and other channels.
Regarding the fact that social media has been reused in other projects, GROK’s explanation is that the team did run other projects before, but it did not think it was a fraud. The project just died because no one cared about it.
In order to quell community doubts,GROK immediately also destroyed all 180 million GROK reserved in the deployers address through two transactions, and the total value of the destroyed tokens exceeded US$2 million.
With the developers positive response,The price of GROK also rebounded to a certain extent immediately, and as of the time of publication, it was temporarily trading at US$0.017, which has rebounded nearly 1 times from the lowest point.
Judging from the current discussions on social media, the stance on this matter can be roughly divided into two major factions.
Those who support GROK believe that from a factual point of view, the GROK team has not done evil yet (smashing the market and running away), and with the destruction of the reserved tokens in the deployers address, GROK has also achieved fair distribution, and the X account was used to Its somewhat excusable, and ZachXBTs accusations are purely FUD.
In response, ZachXBT also responded again:If I spoke up before the insider sell-off, people would accuse me of FUD, but if I did it after the insider sell-off, people would ask me why I didnt call it out sooner. Ill never win over public opinion.
As the most reputable on-chain detective in the Crypto industry, ZachXBT has personally exposed many misconducts in the past and helped many victim projects recover stolen money (the most classic case was pointing out that the hacker may be X after the JPEGd Curve pool was stolen) User @MichaelRazum, the hacker took the initiative to return the stolen money the next day), so a large number of community users chose to support ZachXBT, believing that it is necessary to investigate the opaque situation unknown to the community.
As a third-party media practitioner, I personally firmly support ZachXBTs long-term commitment to maintaining the ecological order of Web3, and agree with its disclosure behavior against GROK.
Judging from this incident, it was ZachXBT’s brave disclosure that pushed the GROK project party to make more disclosures, and then chose to destroy the reserved tokens in the deployer’s address, excluding some that might endanger the future development of the community. Some hidden mines, but finally achieved a relatively good result. From this perspective, the GROK community should be grateful to ZachXBT and should not be harsh on him.
As for whether GROK can continue the amazing trend of the past few days after this crisis, it will need to test the vitality of the community.
