Ben Armstrong, AKA Bitboy Crypto, seems to have been ahead of the game on the fall of FTX. On September 23, 2022, Armstrong posted a video called “FTT and Solana are Dead To Me.” This was over 6 weeks before the FTX scandal broke.
In the video, Armstrong said that while FTT may do well in price, he had another reason for removing it from his portfolio. He explained how he scores coins according to five categories: use case, community, team, tokenomics, and philosophy. With FTT and Solana, he focused in on the philosophy. He discussed how FTT, Solana, and Chuck Shumer were working together to ruin decentralization and crypto. He even went so far as to call the coins “Evil,” and said, “when people find out about it, Sam Bankman Fried is going to have nowhere to hide.”
SBF and Schumer: Besties?
Schumer first showed his anti-crypto stance back in August of 2021. That was when he shut down the Lummis, Toomey, Wyndman amendment that was supported by the crypto community and meant to keep new tech innovation in the US.
We want the next generation of digital banking to built right here in the USA, not pushed overseas.
The amendment from @SenLummis, @SenToomey, & @RonWyden is a positive step to ensure innovation continues to thrive in America. #Crypto #cryptocurrency pic.twitter.com/sPAYoKxEck
— Congressman Ted Budd (@RepTedBudd) August 5, 2021
SBF gave $40 million to Democrats during the 2022 election including $1 million to New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC.
Alameda and FTX Exposed Weeks in Advance
On October 22, 2022 Bitboy released another video titled “The Dark Truth About FTX.” This was about two weeks before the Fall of FTX became public. On the video, Bitboy exposed some shady FTX practices of listing coins before they are public. This allows FTX investors to inflate the price, and then subsequently dump on retail investors once the project is made public. Bitboy discussed how they used Alameda Research to not only short projects, but to also gain influence with policy makers and essentially shape the future of crypto. Eliminating competition and limiting retail investor’s ability to make money was the end goal according to Armstrong.
Big words coming from someone who literally used VC money to pump up Solana. People see through you. You are a liar and you know it.
Don’t worry our bill is going public soon and then I can tell the whole story. Your policy team held us up and then tried to steal our backers.
— Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) October 19, 2022
Bitboy is not immune to his own scandals. While he has 1.45Million followers on YouTube and 1Million on twitter, there are many who don’t like him or even refer to him as a scammer. As a Crypto Influencer, he did paid promotions for several projects in the past. This was a common business model at the time and many influencers around in the earlier days of Crypto followed suit. Scam projects were ripe, and as a paid promoter it became inevitable that an influencer would eventually be tied up with a project that rugged.
Crypto Influencers and Paid Promotions
Armstrong released an apology video in which he detailed the process and why he now thinks it’s wrong for crypto influencers to do paid promotions. He has changed his platform completely. The focus is now on education and news, and his most recent scoops on FTX seem to prove he has a niche.
Ben Armstrong’s new book, Catching up To Crypto: Your Guide to Bitcoin and the New Digital Economy, will be released January 12th. His site, bitboycrypto.com, also offers some educational content including BitLab Academy which offers customized courses designed to guide investors. Love him or hate him, it appears BitBoy has some insight that just might prove useful over the trying times to come.
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