Vitalik Buterin's idea to create the token that would create some problems for scammers and bots has become a reality, and it somewhat replicates the story of another popular memetoken, Nansen reports.
THE token
On Oct. 15, Buterin released a tweet, suggesting the creation of a new crypto project that would be called "THE Protocol," so whenever bots use their common shilling phrases on Twitter, "THE" gets mentioned every time.
Someone actually loved the idea and created an actual project out of Buterin's idea. The token contract for $THE was created shortly after the tweet and rallied massively, gaining 1,000% to its value.
In a similar way to Shiba Inu, the creator of the token decided that it would be fair to send some "royalty fees" to the person who formed and shared the idea. Ten percent of the total supply of THE was transferred to Vitalik Buterin shortly after its creation.
Enormous risks
The top 50 non-entity addresses hold more than a half of THE, gaining exposure to it almost immediately after its release. Large Ethereum traders and investors also took their shot at the newly emerged token. Popular investors like "sisterofvitalik" and hxr.eth both bought the token.
However, some large addresses have already dropped their holdings despite the absence of active selling coming from top addresses and retail holders, which shows how careful traders and investors should be when being exposed to assets like THE that tend to become targets of market manipulation.
Currently, around 41 million tokens are circulating on Uniswap and MEXC, making decentralized platforms the biggest marketplaces for the $THE token. Numerous on-chain and market researching platforms released DYOR warnings when describing the token.