Bolt is a project that has split the community for many months, with some claiming it will revolutionize the watching of sports on TV and others claiming it is nothing but a pump and dump project. With someone behind the scenes dumping tokens by the tens of millions, is the controversial project finally in its death throes?
Classic Pump and Dump
Bolt launched in 2018 as a sports broadcasting platform, raising $9 million in an ICO on the back of potential partnerships. The BOLT token launched on exchanges in May 2019, dumping immediately to less than half its value. Soon after this, questions were being asked of the project’s soundness:
Got sent some interesting info on $BOLT.
Thread incoming, TL;DR, it’s the most obvious fucking shitshow I’ve ever seen.
Not technically illegal, but definitely shady as all hell (and not something you’d ever want to invest in).
— David Holt (@IDrawCharts) December 15, 2019
As more questions were asked of the project, some Twitter ‘influencers’ began to shill the project on a daily and then almost hourly basis:
From time to time in this space, there comes along an opportunity to buy an asset that is just too good to pass on.
Few months ago, my buddy @TradySlim posted a chart for $BOLT that kick started my love affair with this well run & insanely undervalued project.
A true “gem.” pic.twitter.com/ClTxFtrIit
— Satoshi Flipper (@SatoshiFlipper) November 20, 2019
The coordinated shilling became relentless in the later part of 2019, which saw the token jump 400% before the shilling suddenly stopped, and the value crashed. This activity only heightened the suspicions around the project, along with accusations of faked app user numbers:
Been checking out this $BOLT app last days.
They claim having over 1mil MAU and given their views it would make sense.
Just until I decided to check the numbers on a daily basis.Turns out, they upload these highlights videos with a random views number and never update it ? pic.twitter.com/2OF26OZHsG
— Shitcoin Minimalist (@bccponzi) December 10, 2019
Team Moving (and Selling?) Tokens
Accusations then followed that the team were moving tokens from cold wallets to exchanges to sell, moves they put down to “security reasons”, while the token valuation continued to crumbling into dust, missing out on the early-2020 pump that saw other many other tokens double in value:
As we said at the time, any tokens that failed to pump during that period were likely dead, and so it seems to have proved – BOLT’s token valuation has fallen from $0.006 to $0.001 this year, despite attempted reworking of the project’s ‘tokenomics’.
From Bad to Worse
If things didn’t look grim already, the Bolt “financier” dumped another 48 million tokens on already rekt token holders on Thursday, with millions more still held. Not everyone was buying this excuse however:
$BOLT is blaming the ‘financiers’ of dumping tokens on the market again today, but I suspect there is no financier and it’s just $BOLT itself dumping here.
Can this mysterious ‘financier’ please raise his hand and tell me why he would take such a shitcoin as collateral? pic.twitter.com/U00sDohKMC
— Shitcoin Minimalist (@bccponzi) March 19, 2020
This selling moves the tokens back from BEP2 to ERC20 format, which further confuses the already confused circulating supply, which has been a bone of contention for many months among the community.
All that seemingly remains for this project is for the “financier” to finally empty his bags and crush any last remaining hope that the Bolt founders had any other idea in mind other than pumping and dumping their tokens on the public.
