The silent war between Ryoshi Research and centralized exchanges over SHIB

There's a very interesting meta forming, and a story only possible due to the decentralization of tokens. I'm not 100% I know all the details, but let me point some things out and let the smarter people here fill in the details.

I. THE COPYPASTA

I've been participating in the pump/dump group responsible for SHIB, just to learn how it works. I can confirm SHIB started out as a total scam, but it has taken on another form. Grab some popcorn as this is a wormhole for the ages.

In the beginning, it was a copy paste template for literally 50 similar projects with similar dogs and identical contracts. They're the same pump/dump group responsible for ZEP DAO and the other tokens that followed. The way the scam works is they point people primarily to DEXES where they can starve the liquidity pool, and then they use that project to move followers to the next shiny opportunity. You can observe the history of wallets holding large numbers of SHIB to observe the idle trillion coin remains of the other projects. The public-facing communities for these are on Discord but it started on 4chan /biz/, anybody surprised?

II. THE SQUEEZE

Typically these scams only get the attention of low liquidity exchanges like Bitmart that can lend some credibility which supports the pump/dump effort. A coordinated campaign on social media broadcasts these listings and doesn't cause much trouble for trapping funds, due to the low liquidity and cumbersome UI of these crappy exchanges. Nobody bothers and the scam is able to live out its life cycle with high slippage on Uniswap and PancakeSwap. But this time something different happened.

This isn't the first time a pump/dump group pours a ton of shitcoins into Vitalik's wallet, by far. They do this all the time. But this time was different and spun out of their control with some unwelcomed bigger fish.

III. THE POWER SHIFT

The SHIB coin caught lightning in a bottle when SNL made DOGE an uncool boomer coin overnight, and also caught the attention of people who run very large centralized exchanges and saw a strategic opportunity, as well as those who missed the DOGE pump -- especially Huobi users (for reasons I've yet to understand). This time, high liquidity exchanges got involved. Binance, Kucoin, etc. Here's where it gets interesting. Before Binance and Huobi got involved and supplied healthy trading volumes within 10% of the marketcap, allowing generous liquidity at a scale where people that bought into the scam are unlikely to get liquidity-choked out. That doesn't mean users are safe and I'll get to that in part V.

This presents a massive problem for the SHIB creators. Suddenly, they're no longer in control of liquidity. Why do I say strategic opportunity? Binance in particular loves it because it spams the ETH network, increasing the GAS fee as covered in Forbes yesterday, so they doubled-down immediately and even went as far as doing massive giveaways against their trading pairs. This represents a big problem for Ryoshi Research, as the pump and dump volume is now completely out of their control. So what are they to do?

IV. THE ATTEMPT TO PIVOT

Ryoshi Research was already planning to remove yet another piece of the ecosystem - making their own dexes. By operating their own "shiba swap" DEX, they would be able to liquidate holders easier by having "oopsie hacks" and copying/pasting these DEXES to support future scams. The long-term vision here is to control entire blockchains where it is harder to spot what's going on as BSCscan and ETHscan presents a massive peekaboo problem for them as the scam wallets are visible in plain sight. They need to get everybody off of Huobi and Binance as soon as possible.

V. A DRAMATIC END IS NEAR

The next chapter of this saga will be a coordinated campaign by Ryoshi Research to migrate people away to their DEX to receive airdrop shitcoins and swap the SHIB tokens that have a fraction of a cent of value to tokens with zero hope of liquidity, but I believe only a number of SHIB holders will actually do this and Huobi and Binance traders will continue to trade happily on their own... but there's a catch. The ETH smart contract for SHIB has an ownership transfer mechanism. The ingenious guise is that it won't be a rug pull, but a token swap and burning of the 'old' coin. The perfect trap is set but that doesn't mean it's the end for people that put their money into this.

There's 3 ways I think this could potentially end:

1. My guess is Binance will play along and continue to fire their prized ETH spam weapon, and when the rug pull happens they'll apologize and issue 'free' SHIB to everyone impacted on BSC, wher SHIB will either have a second life or find a dormant and stable resting place until the next dog coin craze. It costs Binance next to nothing to issue this, and the punishment inflicted on the competing ETH network will have made it's mark. Or I'm overstating the ETH spam importance and it's just good business for these exchanges to be fiat onramps for meme coins, but it's notable that Binance did not list an ETH/SHIB pair, which I think best supports my hypothesis that this is a silent war. What happens to the price in this case is anyone's guess.

2. The big exchanges allow the scammers to execute the coin burn and wash their hands, effectively fucking their customers because they are too smart to not know what this is. In this scenario, SHIB crashes spectacularly.

3. A hero rises up and rescues SHIB and decentralizes it. The decentralized nature of this allows the community to have its own legitimacy outside of Ryoshi's control. I'm hoping for the community to win, because fuck these guys. But this is the least likely scenario, because that would require informing a lot of people who have no idea this is going on. You'd be competing with Ryoshi's foot soldiers that make less than $4/month. Like I said, it's unlikely but this would be the feel-good story of the year

I fully expect the pump group to downvote this into oblivion, and that's fine. At least it's in print somewhere. I'm really interested in watching how this shakes out.

Isn't crypto fun?

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(minor edits for clarity, some additional info the comments)