• Last year, a social experiment called $GREED aimed to teach crypto enthusiasts a lesson, tricking them into tweeting an embarrassing message.

• The project is back. This time, there's real money involved – a lot of it.

"In Sh*tcoin Season, any pointless cryptocurrency with a Twitter account can enchant thousands of traders into playing memecoin musical chairs. Throwing money at the wall and reason out the window, they let greed get the best of them. Sometimes literally."

That is how I started my May 2023 story about $GREED, a social experiment that duped crypto traders hoping to score a quick buck into embarrassing themselves on Twitter (now X). It was a lesson in good judgment disguised as a money-making opportunity.

The story's moral did not stick. In less than a year, speculators' memecoin greed prompted them to once again trade their good judgment for too-good-to-be-true returns. Presale scammers pitching exclusive memecoins earlier this year stole $122 million from wannabe get-rich-quick degens, according to on-chain sleuth ZackXBT.

It was a devolution of the zero-sum casino games that give crypto a shady reputation. Forget about exchange tokens that traders believe have value, or well-known memecoins that have graduated from pure joke to, well, billion-dollar jokes like DOGE or SHIB. These presale tokens were literal scams. But people were willing to suspend their disbelief to get in early.

"This is so stupid, people are just going to get rugged," $GREED's creator, who goes by Voshy, said in an interview. "How do you teach these people a lesson?"

He decided to recreate his social experiment with a twist. Last time, his nonexistent $GREED token made a mockery of its "victims" without costing them any capital: He duped them into giving him access to their Twitter accounts, letting him shame them by posting an embarrassing tweet about their succumbing to their own greed.

This time, like last, $GREED would not cost its participants anything, nor would there be a token at all. Instead it would be the lure for a surprisingly lucrative staking freeze. $GREED's unwitting participants would lock their own SOL in a staking account, safe from presale predators. While their money was working for them, it would also work for $GREED: an education initiative that Voshy hopes will teach the entire space a lesson.

The plan

For part two of $GREED, Voshy started by tweeting vague promises of what seemed like an upcoming airdrop of a GREED token. It caught on. Just like in 2023, crypto traders started angling for a token they knew nothing about.

Soon, Voshy upped the ante with a website with wallet-connection capabilities. People could now seemingly commit their SOL to GREED. But for what? The website didn't say it was conducting a presale. It made no promises about what it was for, or what people would get. Details didn't matter; in the first hour, 1,527 wallets pledged 6,220 SOL (currently worth about $1 million).

That's where Voshy's experiment diverged from the scammy sh*tcoin presales. Instead of taking people's money in exchange for a token (or in exchange for nothing, as scammers do), Voshy's website had prompted them to stake their SOL tokens to a Solana validator. When they signed the transaction, they locked their tokens to this validator for six months, until mid-September.

"Locking it for three days, nobody would care. We wanted the people to notice, we wanted the people to feel something, to remember it just like last $GREED," Voshy said.

Last year's $GREED experiment taught its unwitting participants to be "very careful" about giving out access to their social media accounts lest they be embarrassed again, the prankster said. With this year's $GREED, "we wanted to achieve that people don't just send their assets out."

Those who locked their money in $GREED aren't completely stranded. They can get their tokens out by creating a governance proposal and then convincing 15 other $GREED participants to vote for their assets' release. A couple hundred of the GREEDy have attempted to lobby their way back to liquidity, with mixed success.

"Vote for me if you also hate presale meta and will never send to anyone again," wrote one participant who failed to get their SOL unlocked through a vote last month.

Unlikely moneymaker

One of the benefits of duping people to stake their SOL during presale scam season is, well, protecting their SOL from presale thieves. But another lucrative benefit: staking yield. Staked SOL earns more SOL.

For those who don't get their money out in votes, they'll have the option to withdraw come Solana's Breakpoint conference in September. At that point, the lock freeze will thaw and with it a pile of extra tokens from $GREED's partner protocols: Samoyed memecoin, the Marms NFT collection, Texture, Famous Fox Federation, Racket and Cyberfrogs. They all pitched in an assortment of tokens and NFTs that will go to those who leave their money in $GREED to the end.

"Everybody who put their SOL in there is going to get more" than they had if GREED was actually a token, Voshy said. He mused: A good chunk would have likely lost their SOL tokens to some other scam if their money wasn't stuck. Instead of losing it, they're earning more through staking at an annualized rate near 8%.

Most validators take a commission on the earnings generated by its staked assets, but the $GREED validator, run by Triton, doesn't, Voshy said. All of its staking yield goes to the frozen stakers, the ones who locked their SOL up for months.

$GREED academy

Voshy's $GREED experiment is attempting to teach the whole space a lesson. Though the validator at the heart of it doesn't take a commission, it does collect tens of thousands of dollars in SOL every month from transaction tips. All that money will go toward education initiatives, according to Voshy.

"Mostly we want to empower people in the ecosystem to educate others," Voshy said. He spat out a few ideas: dapps that incentivize learning about crypto, TikToks and YouTube videos, that kind of thing.

"It's going to be fully crypto education and quite Solana-focused," he said.

Altruism turned $GREED's validator into an unlikely success story. Though a couple thousand SOL were staked before the lockup "gotcha" was widely known, a tsunami of SOL poured in after word got out. The $GREED validator currently has nearly 900,000 SOL tokens – a hoard worth roughly $150 million. More continues to pour in ahead of an end-of-July deadline, he said.