Nightingale's Wings (1): Nightingale's Wings
"The little boy pointed at the PAC-MAN game console of another kid in the distance and said, 'Mom, what is that? I want to play it, too!'"
On a quiet night in April 1985, at Beijing Capital International Airport, a young man from Sichuan was holding a one-way ticket to New York. He was only 10 years old at the time, and his name was Tian Xingzhi. At this moment, he didn't know that the journey he was about to embark on would completely change the trajectory of his life. 20 years later, he would return to his hometown as Andy Tian and set off a storm in the Chinese game industry.
Andy was very smart and had excellent academic performance since he was young. He overcame all difficulties and was admitted to MIT to study computer science. After graduation, he joined the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to provide strategic consulting for Chinese telecom operators and local banks. With his understanding of Chinese and Western cultures and keen insight into technological trends, his solutions have been well received by clients.
In 2005, Andy had an important turning point in his life. At that time, Google China was recruiting talents, and Andy was recruited with his experience in mobile Internet to serve as the head of mobile business. During his tenure, his most important achievement was to assist Andy Rubin, the father of Android, to introduce the Android system and development framework to the Chinese market, which laid the groundwork for the subsequent explosion of mobile Internet.
During his years at Google, he witnessed the rapid expansion of the Internet in China. The popularization of broadband, the decline in Internet fees, and the sharp increase in Internet users made him keenly aware that social games would have huge growth potential in China. Although he promoted related plans within Google, his ideas were difficult to implement quickly due to the company's global strategic pace.
In 2008, Andy chose to leave Google and joined "Xipede Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd." founded by his friend Robin Chen, focusing on the development of web-based social games. The so-called "social games" are lightweight interactive games that rely on social platforms (such as Facebook and Xiaonei). At that time, China was at the forefront of the rise of social networks, and users gathered rapidly, providing a natural flow soil for social games.
After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, global investors paid attention to China's technological potential, and the "Copy from US, Made in China" model became mainstream. With efficient product execution, Hiped launched a number of social games and achieved success. Among them, "Medical Mayhem" launched in 2009 attracted more than 2 million players in just two months after its launch, and accumulated 100,000 fans on Facebook.
Zynga quickly noticed this rising star from the East.
Zynga is a social game company founded in San Francisco in 2007. It focuses on Facebook and MySpace platforms. Most of its games are characterized by rapid iteration, strong social stickiness, and accurate matching of paying users. By 2009, it occupied six of the top ten Facebook game rankings. With the launch of the IPO process, Zynga has set its sights on emerging markets in Asia, especially China and India.
In 2010, Zynga officially acquired Hipede and appointed Andy as the head of Zynga China. In those years, he was at the peak of his career, frequently appearing at industry summits such as ChinaJoy, and became known as the "gaming tycoon" by everyone.
But the tide soon turned. First, after Xiaonei was acquired by Renren, it began to restrict third-party games. Second, China's mobile Internet developed rapidly, and users gradually shifted from PC to mobile. Zynga's development in China encountered a bottleneck.
In 2013, Andy chose to leave again and founded Asia Innovation Group (AIG) with Ouyang Yun, which was later the parent company of Gifto. 2013 to 2014 was the peak period of China's mobile Internet explosion, and the financing market was hot. With his impressive resume, Andy completed the financing from seed round to A round in just one year. KPCB, the investor in the A round, was one of Zynga's early investors.
In June 2014, AIG launched its first product, “Pengpeng”, a mobile social game based on location-based services. Although it did not become a big hit in the Chinese market, it unexpectedly ranked second on the iOS rankings in Malaysia. Andy realized that creating a “Chinese-style social product” for the Southeast Asian market might be more advantageous.
The "Pengpeng Beans" in "Pengpeng" are virtual currencies that can be used to exchange chat bubbles, backgrounds, VIP services, etc. in the mall. The "People Nearby" entrance on the homepage also builds a "mobile social relationship chain" for it. "Going overseas" has become the keyword for AIG. The team quickly deployed multilingual versions, received good feedback in Vietnam, Indonesia and other places, and completed a US$17 million Series B financing at the end of 2014.
With sufficient financing, AIG started the strategy of "burning money to gain market share" and launched in multiple countries simultaneously. However, due to the product's failure to accurately hit the user's pain points and the overly scattered layout, the actual conversion effect was not ideal. At the same time, the popularity of mobile games gradually faded, and capital turned to the O2O field, and AIG's subsequent financing was frequently blocked.
Andy is well aware of the pace of financing. Since 2013, he has been relying on expanding the market scale to obtain a new round of financing, and then launching it into the market to drive user growth. However, the weak business revenue capacity has always been a fatal shortcoming. In 2015, WeChat rose strongly, the traffic of traditional social platforms dropped sharply, and AIG's growth model gradually became ineffective.
In order to maintain traffic monetization, AIG began to try to introduce marginal content and light gambling products, but the returns were meager.
The idea of transformation was quietly brewing in Andy's mind.
Nightingale's Sorrow (2): Every step counts
As early as the beginning of 2015, Andy began to contact the live broadcast industry in Shanghai and Beijing. At that time, he was still on the sidelines, and never thought that this would become a turning point in the fate of AIG. With the emergence of platforms such as Inke, Douyu, and Panda TV, the live broadcast industry shocked the entire industry with monthly turnover exceeding 10 million or even hundreds of millions. This scene is very much like the long-lost "monetization killer" in the social industry. For a time, the wind was howling, and major platforms and capital swarmed in, setting off a thousand waves.
AIG also quickly jumped into this trend.
In mid-2015, the competition in the domestic live broadcast industry was getting fierce, and the venture capital circle began to set off a "going overseas wave" to seek a new growth curve. At this time, AIG's deep cultivation in the overseas market many years ago finally came in handy. As a "Chinese social app" with a stable overseas user base, coupled with the east wind of the "live broadcast" concept, AIG once again won the favor of capital - in October 2015, it successfully won a B+ round of financing of US$7 million. Although it was reduced by two-thirds compared to the previous round of financing, this money ensured that they would continue to stay at the table.
This time, Andy bet right.
2016 is known as the "first year of live streaming" in China. Numerous platforms and anchors have sprung up like mushrooms after rain, and capital has surged, making the industry very lively. But Andy knew that AIG had neither the first-mover advantage nor the capital and resources to compete head-on with giants such as Inke, YY, and Douyu. Therefore, in July 2016, when Uplive was launched, Andy decisively placed the main battlefield overseas, targeting Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Uplive continues the "Copy from China" strategy, reproducing the classic routines in the Chinese live broadcast field one by one: dancing, private chatting, playing on the edge, crazy gift-giving... all in turn. In the eyes of Southeast Asian users, these gameplays are simply a new experience that breaks the worldview - "Wow, it turns out that you can play like this?" Uplive is the first to bring the "anchor guild system", "fan economy system" and "brush volume industry chain" to Southeast Asia, completely subverting the local Internet entertainment ecology. In particular, the "anchor training camp" is a dimensionality reduction attack, which directly burns the CPUs of many Southeast Asian novice anchors.
In terms of product mechanism, Uplive continues the virtual points system of "Peng Peng". Users recharge to obtain "points", which are used to redeem virtual gifts for anchors. Anchors increase user stickiness by promising private chats, customized videos, and even offline meetings, and guide users to increase their volume, forming a strong "instant gratification" closed loop. This points system will also be transferred to the blockchain in the future, which will not be discussed here.
According to official Podcast data:
“Since its launch in June 2016, the Uplive community has grown to 20 million users in over 100 countries, and the platform generated over $100 million in revenue in 2017 (Over 25 million virtual gifts were purchased and sent on Uplive during the month of September alone).”
As of the end of 2017, the Uplive platform had more than 60,000 active anchors, with total revenue exceeding $100 million. According to the 20:80 profit sharing mechanism between the platform and the anchors, the platform's annual gift income was about $500 million. On average, each anchor contributed $8,300 in revenue to the platform. What's even more surprising is that the ratio of male to female users on the platform is as high as an astonishing 9:1.
The essence of live streaming platforms is a business with both technical and policy barriers. In addition to requiring high-concurrency video transmission and high server bandwidth costs, it also requires trust and tacit understanding with local regulators. In addition, how to continuously introduce and motivate top anchors and incubate new anchors is also a key task on the content operation side.
After half a year of trial, Uplive gradually shifted the focus of content production to Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines. This is not only because the regulatory environment is relatively relaxed and the deposit and withdrawal efficiency is high, but also because the anchors in these three regions have both "appearance advantages" and language affinity, and can cover the entire Southeast Asian user group and the Chinese community.
After the overseas business has taken shape, Andy once again put "financing" on the agenda. But this time, he does not intend to follow the old path. The wind of blockchain is blowing, and a more ambitious attempt is brewing.
The Nightingale's Sorrow (3): The Darling of the Times
2017 was the year when ICO exploded. That year, it was not the brave people who enjoyed the world first, but the overseas Chinese who enjoyed the world first - Andy Tian was the darling of that era.
In the summer of 2017, Andy reunited with his good friend Charles Thach (Vietnamese, later Gifto Chief Crypto Officer) whom he met in the United States in Saigon, Vietnam. Charles' family has a prominent status in Vietnam and is well-off. When he was a child, he was sent to the United States by his family to study. After graduation, he worked on Wall Street and gradually accumulated rich investment experience. In 2015, Charles began to get in touch with Bitcoin and invested in some blockchain projects.
Between 2016 and 2017, the ICO (initial coin offering) craze swept the world, and a number of popular projects emerged in Asia, such as Monaco, Kyber, and Tenx, which raised tens of millions of dollars. Charles keenly realized that if Uplive could be packaged and ICOed, the prospects would be unlimited. At that time, China's P2P lending industry was frequently exposed to bankruptcy, and venture capital funds were no longer blindly chasing the trend. The domestic live broadcast industry has gradually formed a "three-way split" situation, and competition is becoming increasingly fierce. It was under this dual pressure that Andy and Charles came together.
With this in mind, Gifto, a project based on blockchain technology and centered on a cross-social platform content contributor reward mechanism and a shopping mall system, began its journey.
“GIFTO, which means ‘gift protocol’, is a universal protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. GIFTO provides an autonomous and self-sufficient system for creating, curating, purchasing, sending and exchanging virtual gifts across major content platforms around the world such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Any content creator can customize and trade these virtual gifts, which can be purchased by selling tokens.”
AIG faced three challenges at the time. The first was technology, as AIG did not have sufficient blockchain technology reserves; the second was endorsement, and the third was policy risk. In order to fill the technical gap, Charles found William Nguyen as the project's encryption technology expert, and through his introduction, he contacted a group of blockchain technology talents including Kyber founder Loi. At the same time, Gifto established a research and development center in Vietnam, and Andy also asked the backbone of the team to learn related technologies in the Chinese office. In order to enhance the technical strength of the project, Gifto also invited big names in the blockchain field such as Loi and Jae Kim to serve as consultants to indirectly endorse the project's technology.
China's policy attitude towards ICO is still unclear. Although its nature may involve illegal fundraising, the market is still hot due to the lack of official characterization. Considering the future operation development and financing needs, Andy decided to set up Gifto's coin issuing entity in the Cayman Islands, and set up companies in Hong Kong and Singapore to operate the project. He also invited Yingyu from TAYLOR VINTERS VIA as the legal advisor of the project to ensure that the project is more "compliant" in terms of organizational structure.
In 2017, most of the ICO market was still stuck on a white paper and an empty decentralization ideal. There were only a handful of projects with actual products, application scenarios, and user data. Uplive, or Gifto, once again achieved a "dimensionality reduction attack" on the industry in this regard. Once the project was launched, it immediately attracted great attention from the market. According to a public press release, Gifto announced in December 2017 that it had received support from 11 top VCs including Pantera, BlockVC, Node Capital, and Signum Capital, and the amount of institutional round financing reached 20 million US dollars. From the perspective of project progress, the actual financing should have occurred in October or even September.
In addition to the jaw-dropping financing results, Gifto's advisory group is also extremely dazzling, including industry leaders such as Shen Bo of Distributed Capital, Loi of Kyber (Kyber's financing amount had reached 52 million US dollars at the time), former Google executive Tom Duterme, and Xu Yiji of Neo, as well as Andy's own aura of successful entrepreneurs, and Uplive's impressive user data and actual landing scenarios. All of this has brought Gifto's momentum to a peak.
ICOs in 2017 are usually divided into two stages: private rounds and public rounds. The operation of the public round is usually that the project party will publish a wallet address, and investors can participate in the investment by transferring ETH. Usually a hard cap is set, that is, after the fundraising reaches the cap, the excess will be refunded in proportion. Gifto's hard cap is 30 million US dollars, 20 million US dollars have been completed in the private round, and the public round is set at 10 million US dollars. The investment conditions of the private round are open and transparent - starting with 300 ETH, an investment of 200,000 US dollars can enjoy a 10% discount, and the position is locked for half a year; the team's tokens will also be locked for 2 years, and there is no limit for the public round. 30% of the tokens are used for fundraising sales, the team and the advisory team will receive 40%, and the company will receive 30% of the tokens.
With the support of first-tier investors such as Pantera, Gifto's Telegram group had heated discussions, and Andy's media interviews and exposure were intensive and frequent. While everyone was eagerly looking forward to it, Gifto's public offering entered the countdown.
However, the turning point of fate came quietly. September 4, 2017, was a day that went down in history in the cryptocurrency world. The People’s Bank of China and seven ministries and commissions jointly issued the “Notice on Preventing the Risks of Token Issuance and Financing”, which explicitly prohibited any form of ICO activities and characterized them as illegal public financing. Only 11 days later, on September 15, the Beijing Internet Finance Regulation Team interviewed the heads of various virtual currency platforms and required them to immediately stop all virtual currency transactions and stop new user registrations.
The glory of ICO is fleeting.
This was undoubtedly a huge blow to Andy. Although Gifto is backed by the name of an overseas live broadcast platform, its community users are mainly concentrated in China. Faced with such a sudden policy change, Andy's situation became extremely embarrassing. Fortunately, Gifto has not yet issued tokens and launched a trading platform, and it has also made arrangements in overseas markets.
On that September night, AIG executives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Hong Kong to discuss the subsequent public offering plan with private investors. According to insiders, Andy met CZ in Shanghai, and through Shen Bo's matchmaking, he facilitated the first exchange-led fundraising in the history of cryptocurrencies - IEO.
At this time, Binance is facing unprecedented challenges and urgently needs a breakthrough to prove itself, and also needs to demonstrate the "function" of BNB tokens and its wealth code. Gifto is the perfect touchstone for this. With its strong overseas project background and Chinese community foundation, plus the endorsement of top VCs and the support of Binance as a public fundraising platform, the effect of the strong combination is mind-boggling.
On December 11, 2017, 10 days after Andy’s birthday, Binance announced that it would conduct a public offering of Gifto tokens on December 14. The public offering target was $10 million, with an amount of $5 million each in ETH and BNB accepted.
At 7pm Singapore time on December 14, 2017, the official Telegram group of Gifto was flooded with messages, and it was hard to keep up with the pace of the updates. Official voices and scammers’ links kept coming and going, and there were also many scam links pretending to be the official website of Gifto. The Telegram community of Binance was also bustling, and everyone was looking forward to this moment.
At 8 o'clock, when the public offering started, Andy's heart was in his throat. All the hard work over the past few months was finally going to pay off. The quota was snapped up in an instant, just like autumn wind sweeping away fallen leaves. The team was still trying to refresh the page to confirm whether they were dazzled. Even in the atmosphere of tension and expectation, Andy could still feel an unprecedented anxiety, success was within reach.
In the end, the oversubscription rate was as high as 1,066 times. (Although Binance did not require KYC at the time, this number still reflects Binance's strong community and Gifto's popularity.)
After the public offering, Binance decided to launch the GTO token ahead of schedule, and officially started trading on December 18, 2017. On the day of launch, the price of GTO soared 10x. This belated gift happened to be delivered on Andy’s 42nd birthday, marking a new climax for Gifto’s career.
Seeing the flowers in Chang'an again one day is just like this
The Nightingale's Woe (4): The Nightingale Chasing the Sun
Those who chase the sun will eventually burn
The morale of the Gifto team, who tasted the fruits of crypto victory for the first time, reached an unprecedented high at this moment. Under the market's high attention, Gifto was successfully "delivered" to Binance, and because many people in the public offering round failed to get on board in time (this may also be related to Binance's early closure of the public offering channel), this enthusiasm continued until the listing of GTO.
It took only 4 months to complete the financing of 30 million US dollars - this achievement is undoubtedly a subversive and crazy achievement for Andy and his team. You know, from the establishment of AIG in 2014 to 2017, the financing amount only reached 20 million US dollars, and the equity was not tradable. All this seems to have opened the door to a new world - it turns out that in the crypto world, funds are so easy to obtain.
In the following days, Andy and Charles began to use their influence to become consultants for multiple projects or participate in private rounds. According to public information restrictions, in the second and third quarters of 2018 alone, Andy served as a consultant for projects such as Carbon Grid Protocol, http:// Boosto.io , DACC and Media Protocol. (The consultant fee at the time was 1% of the token)
Charles was the person in charge of foreign investment for Gifto and Krypto limited. At that time, Gifto teams were present in many well-known projects in Southeast Asia, and the minimum investment amount was generally around hundreds of thousands of US dollars. Most ICO projects were in the early stages, and Gifto lacked formal processes (no due diligence, investment committee voting, post-investment management, etc.), and adopted extensive management. The usual practice was to invest money based on the popularity of the project after being introduced by acquaintances, sometimes without even a contract. Later, there were too many investment targets, and Charles himself could not remember which projects he had invested in.
In addition to investment business, exchanges have also become an important attempt. Perhaps inspired by the success of Binance, the Gifto team is also eager to enter the exchange business. Therefore, Charles and William formed a team in Vietnam (it is unclear whether they were instructed) to create a brand new exchange-Kryptono Exchange (closed in 2019). When Kryptono was first launched, it was backed by the then-prosperous NEM ecosystem, perhaps because Lon Wong, the former chairman of the NEM Foundation, was based in Southeast Asia and Andy had many intersections with him. Kryptono was officially launched in June 2018, and through its unique listing strategy, it quickly attracted a large number of local Vietnamese and Philippine users. Subsequently, Kryptono launched the platform coin KNOW. One detail is that at that time, the NEM tokens all had a monthly airdrop plan, that is, users holding the tokens would receive a certain proportion of tokens as rewards in the next month, which was equivalent to the earliest staking pledge. Judging from the feedback from the Telegram group at the time, the Kryptono team was even suspected of short-changing the airdrop funds.
Despite his sideline, Andy has not given up on Gifto. In fact, Gifto can be said to be one of the pioneers of NFT applications. As early as February 2018, the famous photographer Kevin Abosch cooperated with Gifto to launch "Forever Rose", using the Gifto blockchain universal gift giving protocol to make Kevin's rose photos into a unique blockchain virtual gift. Forever Rose became the world's first blockchain artwork. With the help of blockchain technology, it has become the world's only, tamper-proof, unreplicable and permanently value-preserving. This blockchain rose was priced at $1 million in 2018 and became the subject of media coverage.
At the same time, Gifto frequently released new business news, and GTO performed quite well in the secondary market. In addition, with the strong rise of Binance, Gifto, as the "first person" of Binance Launchpad, received a lot of traffic.
All this seems to be moving in the right direction, but in fact it is just a trap set by the crypto market for optimists.
Nightingale's Sorrow (5): Winter, Scorched Earth, Rebirth, Sigh
When the music stops, all that's left on the dance floor is my embarrassed self.
In the second half of 2018, the cryptocurrency market entered a deep bear market, market liquidity dropped sharply, the price of Bitcoin was halved from its high point, and the price trend of altcoins plummeted. The high spirits of investment turned dim in an instant. Most of the investments went down the drain, and the secondary market path that had always been used - posting business news, secondary market surge, selling coins - gradually became ineffective. Gifto did not make many breakthroughs in its business, and always relied on subsidizing users. As the bonus period of the live broadcast industry peaked in 2018, Chinese live broadcast platforms went overseas one after another, and the so-called model advantages gradually disappeared, and user growth and operating data declined all the way.
At the same time, the exchange business also fell into a downturn. After Kryptono went online, although it experienced a period of user carnival, due to the lack of sustained user growth, the absence of institutional market makers, and severe lack of liquidity, the exchange fell into a vicious cycle of no new coins on the shelves, unable to attract users, and shrinking trading volume. In the end, it had to bet against users, resulting in losses. Although Gifto actively cooperates with the big ecosystem, there is still no substantial breakthrough. As early as October 2018, Kryptono cooperated with EOS, TUSD and TRON, but due to the poor market environment, these collaborations did not produce the expected results.
On July 8, 2019, the crypto exchange Kryptono released its last tweet, and then the entire website crashed, the Telegram and Discord groups quietly disbanded, and the team members collectively "disappeared". Users had nowhere to turn to for help, and the community was full of confusion and helplessness. Fortunately, most users were "freeloaders", but for those project parties who had cooperated with them and provided liquidity, this unexpected disappearance was tantamount to a fatal blow.
Before that, Andy Tian’s Twitter had not been updated since January 3, 2019.
In the cold winter of crypto, the Gifto team chose the most extreme way - to cut off the arm of a hero and deal with the market collapse with a scorched earth policy. They closed almost all external windows, from the official website, Twitter to Medium, GitHub, Reddit, and all went silent. Since then, Gifto has entered a three-year "hibernation" period.
From 2020 to 2021, the entire GTO project was in a state of near "death". In April 2021, an article published by the GIFT team on Medium clearly listed Gifto as a "dead/inactive" project. This is not a joke, but a characterization of its public status.
To make matters worse, in mid-2021, the original official Twitter account of Gifto ( @Gifto_io ) was hacked and began to post a large amount of content similar to the GIFT project, intending to phish or confuse the public, further disrupting the confidence of the market and coin holders.
At that time, Gifto had become a project "shell" with chaotic management, out-of-control channels, and no use scenarios for tokens. Three versions of the Medium page can be found on the Internet. The original whitepaper has been removed, the AIG official website has been closed, and http://gifto.io is inaccessible. All of this suggests that the brand Gifto may have changed hands.
In 2022, with the rise of the Metaverse wave, Gifto reappeared in the public eye with a new identity of "Gifto Metaverse", seemingly trying to find a new story for its "resurrection".
On December 29 of the same year, Gifto announced that Poolz founder Guy Oren joined the project as an advisor. Soon after, in January 2023, Poolz announced a strategic investment in Gifto of up to $2.5 million - this was the first time the project received new capital injection since the ICO in 2017.
Is this part of Binance Labs' "coaching and revitalization" plan? The community has different opinions. After all, Binance does not want its star project, which was first launched on Launchpad, to end up with "corpses lying around". But the truth behind it is ultimately unknown to outsiders.
In January 2023, Gifto officially announced a token swap, upgrading the original GTO to GFT, and made it clear that the new token would only be issued on BNB Chain. Binance also announced support for the upgrade on January 15.
However, fate is unpredictable. Just when everyone was intoxicated with the vision of a second spring after the project was "restarted", on February 6, 2023, Andy Tian died at his home in Beijing due to a sudden illness.
This time, the "eternal rose" can only bloom in longing.
On February 8, two days after Andy’s death, GFT was officially launched on Binance. Under the short-lived stimulation of the “Metaverse” narrative, GFT once led the market, but it’s a pity that Andy can no longer see the glory that belongs to the veteran.
Nightingale's Woe (6): Squeezing Out the Last Remains of Respect
By November 2024, due to the lack of any substantial business support, GFT's market was only a flash in the pan, and all that remained was the urban legend that the team cashed out and left. There were too many negative voices in the community.
On November 26, 2024, Binance announced that it would delist GFT. Two days later, on November 28, everything went out of control - GFT officials unilaterally minted 1.2 billion new tokens on the BNB chain, equivalent to 120% of the original circulation.
Some say that this behavior was a technical operation of the "Vietnamese" faction. Outsiders have no way of knowing. What is certain is that these new tokens were quickly transferred to multiple centralized exchanges, causing a shock in the community. This is simply unheard of. ZachXBT, a well-known on-chain detective, disclosed this operation on Twitter, calling it "an unprecedented and outrageous operation."
https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1861978997376069918…
Faced with public outrage, Binance announced on November 29 that it would immediately stop GFT deposits, but it was too late. Under pressure from public opinion, Binance unprecedentedly moved the delisting date forward from December 11 to December 3. This is the first time in the history of Binance Exchange that a project has been delisted ahead of schedule due to the project owner manipulating the circulation volume.
Gifto was the first Binance Launchpad project and also the first to be delisted early.
GFT's official Twitter account also stopped updating on November 29, 2023. The tweet explaining "why we issued additional shares" became the last words of this account.
postscript
Even though it has been removed from most platforms, Gifto seems unwilling to end.
On February 28, 2025, GFT officially announced its merger with another project called GOTG, and all GFTs will be exchanged for new GOTG tokens in proportion.
On April 12, GFT officials further notified that due to "security reasons", all GFT tokens must be exchanged before April 30, and no later exchange will be accepted.
This operation seems familiar. Familiar taste, different recipe, but the result is still the same. A Web3 project that was once highly expected has once again disappeared at the end of people's trust.
This article is only used to mourn the veterans' journey
Every step in the crypto world has been taken by veterans
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