ICP’s Real Problem Isn’t Marketing – It’s the Culture Around Scams

General
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There’s a recurring narrative in the ICP community:

“If we just had better marketing, the price would go up.”

And while it’s true that marketing matters, it’s not the core issue.

The real problem is that we’ve normalized scams in the ecosystem.

Projects launch with no transparency, no roadmap, and no accountability—yet they get instant support and hype from the community. When someone questions them, they’re accused of “spreading FUD.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

We defend rugs if the dev was “early in the space.”

We promote tokens without asking where the team went.

We excuse silence from founders as “building quietly.”

And worst of all: we reward the same behavior again and again.

This isn’t a marketing problem.

This is a culture problem.

Marketing can’t fix a space that protects bad actors and silences critics.

What we need is accountability, transparency, and actual due diligence—not just hype and wishful thinking.

ICP has incredible tech. But if we keep turning a blind eye to scams, no amount of branding will save it.

It’s time to stop blaming external factors

and start taking responsibility for the ecosystem we’re allowing to grow.

~Badri
Founder of PurgeDAO

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All comes to down to token price. If no upside is in sight, no new devs or companies want to build on it. This means same old rugger group is spinning up projects and drain community. Up to 50% projects can be made by that group.

Building on ICP was super hard too as Dfinity did not build us tools, this set us back 3 years.

If we want ICP to get adoption, than top holders need to cooperate. Make system where pumping ICP is possible, learn from Ethereum and Solana. As Dfinity told that most money it makes is spent, they do not have funds or will to pump price. This might even be reason why they make private company Utopia Labs or whatever its called, if ICP fails, they at least have way to make money for themselves. Its actually illegal, being non profit organisation, use investors money and even Dfinity funds, use ICP RnD to form private companies like Utopia. Even if they want to make Caffeine to have its token, its not on best interest of ICP token investors. Caffeine should not have its own token.

Leadership is the one who shapes ICP, community can help, but if founders dont care, we cant do anything about it.

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Yeah like DOLR AI - with all their subnet-destroying crap (yes, it is true, I’ve already posted exactly what they did and seen the results on many projects.) Just before Saiko comes in with his boilerplate responses.

They’ve got 33 employees? What’s that 4 per user of their platform? 20,000 canisters per employee? Nothing adds up. Now they want to siphon $450k for 3 months work and people ARE LETTING THEM DO IT.

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Lets purge!

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Do you think this text is enough for Adam to give you access to his feeder? :slight_smile:
For the sake of a clickbait headline and the appearance that you care about the well-being of the ecosystem, you underestimated the importance of the marketing problem and the fact that the foundation did not develop the ecosystem. It is the norm that some projects parasitize on weak but existing ecosystem support mechanisms. It’s just that if the foundation had fully developed the ecosystem, the percentage of parasites relative to the percentage of successful projects would have been lower. But because of the fund’s inaction, the opposite is true for us. Well, when you talk about protecting scammers, you’re not telling a very important truth. Often, your claims that someone is a fraudster are based on your subjectivity, bias, emotions, and dislike, rather than facts.

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Blaming price and tooling ignores the real issue:

a culture that normalizes scams and protects bad actors.

You say 50% of ICP projects are from the same rug group—and yet no one calls them out. That’s not a DFINITY problem.

That’s a community problem.

Pumps don’t fix trust.

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It’s not about emotions or bias when I call out scams.

It’s about recognizing patterns and protecting the community.

Ignoring the warnings just lets the bad projects keep going

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That proposal is nothing more than a cash grab. The math doesn’t add up, and the community should be asking serious questions about where that money is really going.

We can’t let projects like this drain resources without delivering value.

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Yes, it does, it shows that Founder of ICP values its own tech, it shows that he is working to increase value of what he is building.
ICP price is lower than 3 years ago, now count fiat inflation, ICP has actually lost up to 50% of buying power even if price is at same level as 3 years ago.

Main problem is still that Dfinity did NOT build ecosystem for users, they focused on tech, beliveing that its best blockchain and that no need to find buyers or even no need to pump it up themselves.

Scams just use this undeveloped ecosystem to spread theyr roots to everywhere.

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Pumps don’t fix trust, they just cover up a broken ecosystem. DFINITY built the tech but the ICP community let scammers thrive. Until that changes, no pump will matter

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indeed.
Let’s Purge.

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But if Dfinity had given positive price movements, more actual devs would be here with actual products. Then if Dfinity had build from start a wallet, NFT marketplace and tools for building stuff, ICP ecosystem should be top 10 right now.

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The scam is happening — can DFINITY use NF neurons to stop it?

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I hope someone can stop this.

We all know what will happen with YRAL after the proposal is approved.

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107k usd funding for a month looks insane, as theyr platform does not make money. Its better to pull funds out, buy with those funds other ICP ecosystem tokens that have future (that have income), stake them, than give all neuron holders addresses new project staked neurons.
No point funding projects that dont build apps that generate sustainable income.

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No boilerplate responses Adam.

We are cleaning up our unused canisters. You won’t have any grief from our canisters.

Although we, the DAO did pay for those canisters…

But, yeah. We thought that the protocol could keep improving so that it wouldn’t be a bottleneck. But we understand when practical limits hit us.

Give us a couple of weeks. It’s in the works.

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To this I would add Dfinity’s response to FuelEVs claim that they will reverse the SNS and hand back subscriber money. When I asked on this forum a why that process was taking so long a guy from Dfinity said “give them some time” and that was months ago… Doing nothing is not an appropriate response from Dfinity.

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No saikat the sns investors and the neurons funds paid for those canisters.

Thats your guys problem. You think the daos money is your money.

And youre doing everything you can to take it from the dao and put it in your pocket.

As much as possible, as quickly as possible.

Dont flag me bro

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That’s what I said, we, the DAO

I believe you’re overlooking this fact

We’re THE BIGGEST contributor to the Yral SNS DAO

We’ve been here since GENESIS building the dapp and post SNS, the biggest contributor to the DAO and that’s what we’ll keep doing

1 Like