https://ethgasstation.info/ is interesting in that it shows the biggest generators of gas fees on the Ethereum network. It is also interesting to see how many of them are Ponzi schemes.
The biggest at #2 is Forsage (yes, you can argue that Tether is a Ponzi scheme as well) . As I was writing this, Eth Gas Station had it around 9.5%:
Jumping across Dune Analytics you can see that indeed Forsage is using around 9% of the entire Ethereum platform in terms of transaction fees:
These are crazy figures. $100 million and $4 million in gas fees? So what is Forsage? Their website even with it’s bad English doesn’t make any attempt to hide that it is a Ponzi:
It is based on building a partner network. You tell potential partners about the possibilities of the platform and attract them to work together. Partners, using your link, commit the first transaction to the address of the smart contract that are instantly redirected to your wallet.
This page explains Forsage much better, but it works by attracting more users to invest in multi-level “slots”. Each slot is twice as expensive as the previous, and returns twice as much profit back to the original referrer.
Checking the transactions on the contract itself on etherscan shows that it does indeed transfer the transaction to another wallet and the contract stays at 0 balance. So how do they make their money? I guess it pays to be the guy at the top 🙂
Anyway, if you were an early adopter you are likely doing very well. Reading the comments on the contract are very interesting – there are a lot of passionate people in this. I guess it had something to do with this notice at the top of the page:
MMM, Lions Share, Easy Club, Million Money are in the top 25 and in researching these smart contracts I came across this interesting article which describes them in detail.
So why should we care? Well, they are a key factor in driving gas prices up. And you can surmise that those wait times aren’t going down anytime soon.
BitInfo shows the average price in early 2020 was around $0.06-0.08USD. Now the price is > $1.3USD. It just shows getting that early alt coin wasn’t necessary – you just had to be a miner 🙂
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