When the market is not good, demons and monsters come.

I saw a peer post such a news last night, which confused me: How come I have never heard of such an AI project that raised so much money before?

I opened the official Twitter account and saw that no one I followed followed it. If a project is like this, I usually won't read it any further. In the crypto world, if you are the only one who discovered a gem, it often does not mean that you have a keen eye for gems, but that it is a scam that others don't want to get involved in.

"Stitched Monster" Project

Based on the principle of being responsible to my peers, I decided to continue reading. Peers say Aidatify is a full-chain AI aggregator. If you take the name literally, you will think that it integrates AI services and resources on multiple blockchains?

According to the official introduction of this project, it is actually a DEX data aggregator, and its product functions should be similar to DefiLlama. The reason why it is related to AI is that Aidatify claims to have advanced AI technology that can process 500 TB of data and 3 million smart contract addresses every day.

What is the concept of 500 TB? If the size of a photo is 2MB, it will process 250 million photos a day; if the size of a 4K movie is 50GB, it will process 10,000 4K movies a day. Simply put, only Internet giants can handle data of this scale, and it is a bit exaggerated for a project that has raised less than 20 million US dollars to say so.

In the white paper, Aidatify also emphasized that it can recommend high-yield, low-risk DeFi products to users through machine learning and deep learning algorithms. But there is no mention of what specific algorithm is used to do this.

Perhaps thinking that just having an "AI" Buff is not enough, Aidatify has also stacked a "lossless re-staking mining" Buff. It can be said that this year's narrative hot spots have been stitched together by it.

I don't know how other people feel when they see this sentence, but I just feel a little flustered when I see the word "lossless". After all, the first money I lost when I entered the cryptocurrency circle was on Luna stablecoin. When a project says that the income product it provides is risk-free, then the project itself is the biggest risk.

Suspicious financing and swindlers

Let's go back to the $17.5 million Series A financing announced by Aidatify. This amount of money is really not a small amount, especially since VCs are generally tight on money now. It seems fake that a team with no background can raise so much money at once.

First of all, there is an obvious inconsistency between the financing information announced by Aidatify and its token economic model. Aidatify announced that it has completed a $17.5 million Series A financing at a valuation of $150 million. However, according to its token economic model, the fully diluted valuation (FDV) of AID tokens is only $1 million (100 million tokens * $0.01 per token). Investors invested $17.5 million, but according to the token allocation, the value of the tokens allocated to VCs is only $100,000 (10 million AID * $0.01 per token).

Secondly, the lead investor SM Capital is also a swindler VC. According to the official website, SM Capital was founded in 2011 and is an investment team from Wall Street with more than $2 billion in assets under management. Strangely, although the official website lists so many investment portfolios, no news announcements about SM Capital's participation in these projects can be found. After BlockBeats verified with some of the project parties mentioned above, they all responded that they did not know this VC at all.

SM Capital's official website's portfolio

I looked through SM Capital's official Twitter account. Although it was registered in November 2011, the first tweet was only posted last week. Except for Aidatify, no project owner followed it. Only 8 of the 3,840 followers have blue badge certification. The rest of the followers seem to be bought followers. I can't see them anymore after a while.

Chinese investors are showing off their skills

At this point, I am very sure that this financing news is a fake project and a fake VC that is used to deceive investors, and it is also a Chinese investor.

Why is it a Chinese investor? Although the white paper introduces that all the team members are foreigners who graduated from various prestigious universities, the small details of the official website and promotional videos directly show off their skills.

First of all, the language options on the official website are either English or Chinese. Ordinary foreign project owners cannot be so considerate.

What is even more outrageous is that although the two promotional videos released by the official website are dubbed in English, the subtitles are only in Chinese, and there is no English subtitles. So it is hard to say that this video is not tailor-made for Chinese people. The entire English dubbing, plus some AI and blockchain terms, is to make it difficult for leeks to understand. Only when you don’t understand, you can be easily deceived!

Summary

The financing news of Aidatify not only fooled many peer media in the currency circle, but also capsized the famous venture capital database website PitchBook.

On the PitchBook website, the financing of Aidatify was attributed to another SM Capital. According to the PitchBook website, this SM Capital is a European VC founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Marino. It has previously invested in financial technology companies Stripe, Qomodo, and even Musk’s SpaceX. I wonder if Aidatify would be surprised to see it listed alongside these top companies?

Here I would also like to remind readers not to blindly rely on information from a single source, but to conduct cross-verification from multiple sources to ensure the accuracy of the information and avoid being deceived.

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