The NFT world is no longer what it used to be, yet we keep falling into the same traps. How can a project that sets up a profile in September or October launch a mint the very next month (or even the same month) while already boasting 10,000/20,000+ followers? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the followers are bought, the comments are purchased, and the hype is entirely fake. And yet, people keep minting these projects only to get rugged time and time again. I’ve been building PHNX for nearly a year. I’ve been approached at least 200 times by people offering bots for fake Discord conversations, artificial server boosts, bought followers, comments, and reactions , I’ve turned them down every single time. I have no interest in building something fake; I want real people to follow what I’m doing and to truly understand what I’m building. Please, stop enriching the same people who scam you, only for them to turn around the next day and launch another project to scam you all over again. Be smart. The NFT space isn’t dying because of these scammers, it’s dying because you keep making them rich. If we were all just a little better informed and more discerning, these scams wouldn’t see a single mint. In my own small way, I’m trying to develop protective solutions against this, but it’s an uphill battle if no one else cares. NFTs are here to stay, they will never disappear. The crypto world has always moved in cycles, but we need to approach these periods differently. We need to study more and be better prepared. Don’t throw your money into the next project that offers zero utility and relies solely on hype, because that hype is, without a doubt, completely fake. Amidst all this, there are people who are genuinely trying to build something real, and it wouldn’t be hard to tell the difference if we just took an extra minute to pay attention: - checking when accounts were created - seeing how many times usernames have been changed - looking at the blockchain to see if they’ve interacted with malicious contracts in the past. But perhaps the problem is that we don’t actually want to do that, because if we did, the illusion would come to an end.