🚀 How the crypto world embellishes announcements


⚫️ Yesterday, there was a buzz around the announcement of a “UAE Golden Visa for staking TON,” followed by a denial from the UAE. Now, TON has issued a clarification, saying that there is no new visa program in the UAE and no partnership with the UAE government—only an “experimental partnership” with an unnamed company.

⚫️ It’s possible the idea was that the partner company would help users obtain visas through existing, well-known channels. In that case, the original news might boil down to this: users could now pay this kind of intermediary in TON instead of the usual US dollars. So, some event did happen—but it was presented as something much bigger, with a higher-profile partner. And this reminds us that similar situations occur regularly in the crypto world.

⚫️ Just recently, Robinhood announced “tokenized shares of OpenAI.” Sounds impressive — does that mean you can now become a shareholder in a leading AI company via blockchain? But OpenAI quickly responded, saying they hadn’t approved any such tokens and that they do not represent ownership in OpenAI. Robinhood countered that the tokens still give investors indirect exposure to the underlying assets. Still, the news made a much louder splash when it looked like an official partnership with OpenAI.

⚫️ Back in 2018, Justin Sun, founder of TRON, proudly tweeted about a partnership with a company called Baofeng, calling it the “Chinese Netflix.” It seemed like a major win for TRON. But critics pointed out that Baofeng didn’t really deserve the “Chinese Netflix” label, and that the deal wasn’t with the parent company, but only with one of its subdivisions.

⚫️ We’ve also written before about the launch of the XAUt0 token, which was often described as “Tether bringing digital gold to TON.” But in reality, Tether may not have even known it was happening: other people had taken Tether’s XAUt token, passed it through the LayerZero protocol, and ended up with XAUt0. In theory, anyone could have done the same.

⚫️ A clear pattern is emerging: many stories that appear to be “major partnerships” are actually tied to intermediaries, subsidiaries, wrapped tokens, or similar setups. It’s a bit like an iPhone reseller claiming, “I’m in business with Tim Cook.” Technically, you could say that, but…

💡 So be cautious when you see flashy crypto announcements — even from big names who seem “too reputable to lie.” Beyond outright falsehoods, there’s also a lot of strategic embellishment out there. And that kind of hype is more common than you might think.

@thedailyton