Crypto YouTuber Rug-Pulled His Own Followers, Claims It’s A ‘Social Project’

As people go through life, they are bound to affect others around them and their lives, as well. With that said, most people would like to leave a good impression and not damage those they come into contact with. Fortunately, a regular person doesn’t have that much influence over others to begin with. This is not the case when it comes to influencers, however, and one recently decided to abuse his power for his own gain. Worse still, he is completely denying that he did anything wrong.

What happened?

According to what is known, an individual known as Patrick Shyu, or TechLead, as he calls himself on YouTube, is a former Google tech lead that has developed quite a community on the world’s largest video platform. Shyu managed to attract over 1.1 million subscribers since he started posting videos, and he recently used them to conduct a multi-million pump-and-dump scheme.

The former Google employee launched a cryptocurrency called the Million token (MM). He used a decentralized exchange Uniswap to launch a DEX and offer the coins to investors. This all took place only last Thursday, on July 1st.

He, of course, had everything that a project should have, including a website that described Million as a pre-mined cryptocurrency. The site further claims that the project has a fixed total supply of 1 million tokens, and that each of them is backed by one USDC, which is perfectly believable.

However, despite the fact that he has essentially created a stablecoin backed by a stablecoin, he claimed that the project doesn’t have a maximum value. In other words, he claimed that its price could, in theory, grow indefinitely. At the time of launch, the token’s price was $1. However, within only 3 days, its price skyrocketed by 3,500%, hitting $36.87 by late Sunday.

Since then, the price has dropped significantly, going down to $15.26, or dropping by 58%. Naturally, such price behavior immediately led to the accusations of it being a pump-and-dump project, mostly coming from the Crypto Twitter. One user, known as DCF GOD, even pointed out that there have been massive amounts of liquidity pulled from Uniswap by the address that minted the Million tokens.

The Twitter user argued that the project removed liquidity without selling, which is essentially selling without selling. As a result, he was not obligated to tell the community what he did while they were all buying. All he had to do was keep 1 million of USDC liquidity.

Shyu’s response

It wasn’t long before the developer joined the conversation, responding to the accusations. He started by calling them an ‘absolute FUD,’ claiming that ‘this is how liquidity works in Uniswap v3.’

Others were quick to respond by saying that he missed the point of the accusation. Users explained that Shyu created a ‘get rich quick’ scheme in order to dump on their followers. He was adding liquidity when the price was low, and removing it when it surged. This allowed him to profit at the investors’ expense.

However, the explanation fell on deaf ears, as Shyu even published a YouTube video, arguing that he did nothing wrong and that he did not rug-pull his investors by doing what he did. The biggest twist came when he said that MM shouldn’t even be considered an investment, as he treated it as a social experiment, essentially proving the accusations and showing that he had no respect for his investors or their money.