Little Shapes was a ‘social experiment’ to expose NFT botnets: founder

Atto, the pseudonymous founder behind Little Shapes NFT has revealed that the project is actually a “social experiment” designed to shed light on large-scale NFT botnet fraud on Twitter.

Since late December, Little Shapes has been drawing attention from the media and crypto community. This is due to a series of semi-viral tweets detailing the happenings in the life of the founders which seem to be very good.

Examples include him waking up from a five-month coma, finding out he had assets locked up in FTX, telling his wife and then discovering he was having an affair with someone in the NFT industry.

On Twitter February 2 thread However, the Little Shapes NFT account told its 30,800 followers: “thank you for all your participation – Little Shapes is a social experiment by @BALLZNFT” and shared a link to the 158-page document.

“The show is real. Here’s how influential influencers and founders are spending $200 million + from the ecosystem through 274 projects,” wrote Little Shapes NFT, adding:

“During the past year, NFT Twitter has been manipulated and controlled mostly by a single Twitter botnet. It usually appeared in February 2022, then used together with influencer networks and alpha groups to sell projects.

The document is titled “An insider NFT bot network that has controlled the market behind the scenes.”

It has been reported that since February 2022, many low-level NFT projects have deployed bot networks to artificially create hype and legitimacy, all in an effort to attract investors.

Speaking to BuzzFeed News on February 2, Atto who is also the founder of BALLZNFT, described Little Shapes as “performance art” and insisted that “people don’t pay attention unless you give them a reason to.”

“I need a story that sells so that no one ignores a story that hurts,” he said.

The document shows a bot network such as “Dmister” that sells social media engagement is the main method for these NFT projects, as it only charges around $100 per 1,000 likes, retweets and replies.

The BALLZNFT team even used Dmister to promote Little Shapes NFT to give an example of how it works.

Little Shapes bot engagement post: The insider NFT bot network that has been controlling the market behind the scenes

Once these projects have succeeded in creating enough hype to attract real investors, they are “pulled under the rug or the bastards, usually within a few months, and the people behind the project get $3 or $4 million,” Atto told Buzz. Feed, adding:

“What I find frustrating is that we’re in a place where we’re ranked with social capital and fake Twitter engagement where none of it is real.”

Little Shapes was previously described as an upcoming avatar-style project with 4,444 NFTs that uses a special software “engine” to allow owners to interact with and change the shape of the artwork associated with the token in real time.

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BALLZNFT, however, looks genuine because the NFT project was minted for the first time on February 3 with a token artwork depicting a reference to the entire Little Shapes debacle.