GROK’s team is accused of having a criminal record, will the myth of the ten-thousandfold Meme come to an end?

GROK's Team Faces Criminal Charges Will the Ten-Thousandfold Meme Myth Finally be Debunked?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

On November 4th, local time in the United States, Elon Musk’s xAI team released its first AI large model product – Grok.

As the favorite target of attention in the crypto industry, Musk’s big move naturally did not escape the attention of various speculative players. Within a week of Grok’s release, hundreds of tokens with the same name appeared on major Layer1 and Layer2 networks.

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Out of the many tokens with the same name, the GROK token on the Ethereum network with the contract address 0x8390a1DA07E376ef7aDd4Be859BA74Fb83aA02D5 (from now on, all references to GROK will refer to this token) ultimately stood out and became one of the most traded and hottest speculative targets in the current crypto market.

GROK is a pure meme token. The project temporarily designed a logo and website page based on the concept of xAI, and placed the token contract in a prominent position. At the time of writing, the official X account of GROK has more than 15,000 followers, and the Telegram channel has more than 13,000 people.

GROK was deployed on the same day as Grok’s launch (November 4th), with a total supply of 6.9 billion tokens (note: 69 and 420 are two favorite numbers for Musk’s memes). After creating the token, GROK’s developers immediately added 5.016 billion GROK and 1 ETH to the Uniswap V2 pool as initial liquidity.

Based on the approximate price of ETH at $1900 on November 4th, the initial circulating price of GROK was about $0.00000038, and this price can also be checked through historical data provided by Dex Screener.

According to Bitget’s market data, after more than a week of speculation and hype, GROK briefly rose to about 0.025 USDT on the evening of November 13th, an increase of about 65,000 times from its initial circulating price.

This should have been a day of “celebration” for the GROK community, but the festive atmosphere came to a halt with a tweet.

On November 13, at 23:59, ZachXBT, a well-known blockchain detective who has exposed multiple scams, stated that GROK was created by scammers because the official X account (ID: 1690060301465714692) of the project has been repeatedly used in at least one scam.

As a result of ZachXBT’s investigation, the price of GROK quickly plummeted, dropping to around $0.0087 at one point, a decrease of over 65% from its peak.

In response to ZachXBT’s accusations, the developers of GROK quickly made a response through official Telegram channels, X SLianGuaice, and other channels.

Regarding the fact that the social media account was previously used for other projects, the explanation from the GROK side is that the team did indeed operate other projects in the past, but they do not consider it fraud. Those projects simply failed due to lack of interest.

In order to appease community concerns, the GROK team subsequently destroyed all 180 million reserved GROK tokens in the deploying address through two transactions, with the total value of the destroyed tokens exceeding $2 million.

With the positive response from the developers, the price of GROK also experienced a certain rebound, reaching $0.017 at the time of writing, nearly doubling from the lowest point.

Based on current discussions on social media, there are roughly two stances on this matter.

Those who support GROK believe that based on the facts, the GROK team has not engaged in wrongdoing (dumping and running). With the destruction of reserved tokens in the deploying address, GROK has also achieved fair distribution. The use of the X account for other purposes can be somewhat understandable, and ZachXBT’s accusations are merely FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

In response, ZachXBT also reiterated, “If I speak out before the insiders sell off, people will accuse me of FUD. But if I do it after the insiders sell off, people will ask me why I didn’t warn earlier. I can never win public opinion.”

As the most reputable online detective in the Crypto industry, ZachXBT has previously exposed many improper behaviors and helped many victimized projects recover stolen funds (the most classic case being when he pointed out that the hacker behind the theft in the JPEG’d Curve pool may be user @MichaelRazum, and the hacker voluntarily returned the stolen funds the next day). As a result, a considerable number of community users have chosen to support ZachXBT, believing that it is necessary for him to investigate unknown and opaque situations within the community.

As a third-party media practitioner, I personally strongly support ZachXBT’s long-standing efforts to maintain the order of the Web3 ecosystem and agree with his disclosure of GROK’s behavior.

In this case, it was precisely because of ZachXBT’s brave disclosure that GROK’s project team made more disclosures, which led to the decision to destroy the reserved tokens in the deployer’s address, eliminating some potential pitfalls that could have endangered the future development of the community, and ultimately achieved a relatively positive outcome. From this perspective, the GROK community should be grateful to ZachXBT instead of blaming him.

As for whether GROK can continue the astonishing trend of the past few days after this incident, it will test the vitality of the community.

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