Atto, the pseudonymous founder behind the Little Shapes NFT, revealed that the project was actually a “social experiment” designed to highlight scams on the large-scale non-perishable botnet (NFT).
Since late December 2022, Little Shapes has been attracting a lot of attention from the media and the crypto community. This is due to several near-viral tweets detailing incidents in the founder’s life that sounded too good to be true.
Examples included waking up from a five-month coma, discovering he had assets locked on FTX, telling his wife and then finding out she was cheating on him with other people in the NFT industry.
However, on February 2, the Little Shapes NFT account mentioned to its 30,800 followers: “Thanks for sharing everyone — Little Shapes was a social experiment by @BALLZNFT” and shared a link to the 158-page document.
“The show was real, though. Here’s how a ring of influencers and founders drained $200M+ from the ecosystem of 274+ projects,” Little Shapes NFT wrote, adding:
“Over the past year, NFT Twitter has been mostly manipulated and controlled by a single Twitter botnet. It mostly appeared in February 2022, and then was used in combination with a network of influencers and alpha groups to sell projects.”
The document itself is titled “The Internal NFT Botnet That Was Controlling the Market Behind the Scenes.”
It claims that since February 2022, a large number of low-level NFT projects have deployed botnets to artificially build hype and legitimacy, all in an effort to attract investors.
Speaking with BuzzFeed News on Feb. 2, Atto, who is also the founder of BALLZNFT, called the mini shapes “performance art” and stressed that “people don’t pay attention unless you give them a reason to.”
