Twitter user @crypt0fungus changed their online persona to that of a woman and their engagement rose by 91%. One day fungus was tweeting about annoyances with the new Star Wars movie, and the next, he was catfishing Twitter as a female named Crypto Kimberly.
Read moreCrypto influencer catfishes as a woman - his engagement increases by 91%
Yesterday, Matic, an Ethereum side-chain protocol, saw around a 80% decrease in price after about a month of upside. Afterwards, anonymous traders on crypto Twitter couldn’t help but express racism towards Indians due to the ethnicity of Matic’s leadership.
The most noticeable thread where users were stereotyping was on zyzz’s Tweet, a trader with a paid group and frequent of crypto Discord chat rooms. He posted a picture of EtherScan’s records of the Matic Foundation sending MATIC to Binance, implying that they were responsible for the crash, and included a picture of the founders next to it.
Here’s some replies to the thread:
All Indians ?
— headshot (@highofcrypto) December 10, 2019
Obviously, these commenters are associating a derrogatory stereotype of Indian people as scammers. A common slur that I’ve seen in crypto Discord groups is to joke about “Pajeet” when talking about a scam. Pajeet is a stereotypical name for Indian people, and apparently the slur started on 4chan.
Here’s another offensive response in the same thread:
This is what happen when you trust indian tech support.
— Mivory (@PallasMivory) December 10, 2019
One founder of Matic, Sandeep Nailwal, responded to the racial attacks.
“I m seeing such racial attacks on a hardworking Indian project which hs been striving hard & making an impact even with small resources Entire Indian community needs to unite against this racial slur & fight to prove our worth We hv top Indian teams in all blockchain sectors” - @sandeepnailwal
While it’s natural for people in the crypto space to be weary of pump-and-dump schemes, and there appears to be reasonable evidence that suggests the Matic Foundation has sent large amount of money to Binance, the immaturity in the crypto space is concerning.
Before, we have covered an anonymous crypto trader with 70,000 followers saying that women should never have been able to vote. It’s possible to have a messed up sense of humor, but the frequency in which this behavior is accepted, and the lack of consequences due to anonymity is a plague to the space.
Crypto is one of the few industries where privacy and anonymity is respected to an extent, but it may be detrimental to the expansion of the space as the culture could deter a large demographic of people. At the same time, it attracts those who desire the ability to spread hatred, ethnocentrism, etc.