Cheers Michael, I hope this thread stays active as we go through the New Year as it’s more important than ever to have out of the box ideas from a wide range of people who contribute as community members.
I want to take some time to write down my thoughts on priorities on behalf of the community. Yesterday, a not-so-small Chainlink account called stake.link indirectly a scam. Unfortunately, there were no community members that responded 12 hours after it was posted, so I took it upon myself to respond to the account with a comprehensive rundown of why stake.link offers a higher reward rate than staking.chain.link from the main handle.
There was a brief back and forth and though it was good that we were consistently getting more likes than the account (good optics), there was few pushback from the community in the comments. (It is worth mentioning this user has blocked many people, but not everyone).
This has been the case for some time now. On the $100m TVL achievement tweet, there was a user who commented the following:
">We’ll never take that privilege for granted.
Like that time you rugged all your original investors that supported you in 2017 $LPL"
He received 6 likes with 4 community members responding.
I think the ideas of revamped videos and an active YouTube and explainers and “how to” videos are great ideas, but in my opinion, it’s clear that a core 2025 objective for the stake.link community is to take a stand and fight back.
This is our protocol. This is our work. This is our future, and there are those in the Chainlink Community who are actively fighting us, and right now, they’re winning the PR game.
The account in question yesterday that called us a scam has 4,500 followers, people who don’t have much of a technical background of Chainlink or how the Network functions, nor do they have a full understanding of what happened in 2022.
So when they read about outright disinformation against the protocol, they’re likely to believe it. As Mark Twain famously said, "It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Hell, these people don’t fully understand Chainlink node operators.
It’s not Chainlink Labs that runs the infrastructure. They build it, and node operators run it.
It’s also fair to point out that Chainlink Labs is more focused on socials on updates, integrations, announcements, their products, and less focused on basic, fundamental education on things like how the Network works (E.g., it’s ran by a large # of individual node operators), and in the day and age of information overload and information asymmetry, it’s on us to fill this gap.
We’re very fortunate however to be able to look back and acknowledge that this environment we’re operating in is quite different from 2023 for example. Every tweet / every other tweet would be filled with anger, rage, disinformation, and sometimes death threats.
Now, it’s scaled back as we’ve proven we’ve built a product that drives real utility to the Chainlink Network and is by all trackable metrics a better deal than pre-SDL.
But there continues to be a vocal group of people who go out of their way to actively FUD stake.link, and there’s little pushback.
We cannot let the main account, Michael, Tokenized, Mayor, SmartCon Drummer, Ari and others to take this on themselves. These people have lives and families and work obligations, and especially aren’t able to be online to take it on themselves.
It must be a collective effort by the community, pushback and combatting FUD in a readable, concise, and professional way (Everyone’s style is their own of course but we don’t want to make the protocol look bad).
Take for example, Fishy.
Fishy’s story is a fascinating one. Many don’t understand the extent of it – he’s been linkposting the chainlink thesis for 6 going on 7 years now. Combating FUD, never wavering, never spreading misinformation, only on a singular mission for his bags not because he holds them, but because he’s right.
“Well we can’t argue with these people, they’re smooth brains.”
Correct, they are largely unintelligent people, but remember, you’re not trying to convince them that they’re wrong when they are (dunning kruger), you’re pushing back against misinformation that their followers and other people who discover us will see.
I’ll also circle back to Fishy here. Fishy takes no prisoners and will take on anyone in Crypto Twitter. From the smallest XRP account suggesting that BlackRock is going to buy $9T of XRP to Chris Blecc to founders to VCs – he is hellbent on fighting back and not taking shit.
Many people just write him off as another delusional cult member like XRP accounts or a nomadic grifter like murad, but he’s poised to become one of the main characters of crypto twitter with 100s of thousands of followers because he’s hilarious, he’s extremely knowledgeable, and he will fight anyone who dares to cross his thesis and the ultimate truth that is Chainlink.
We need this. We need people to be more active. We can’t keep taking slug after slug. We must fight back.
What I propose: for those who wish to take a more active role in combating outright misinformation against what we’re building, we create a Telegram Group that members will keep alerts on / not silence that is solely to be used to paste twitter links of active FUD against the protocol, and for users in the group to coordinate responses and go on the offensive.
THIS will move the needle forward in a significant way. THIS is what we need.
I welcome other thoughts on the solution / implementation / overall idea, but this is an area of opportunity for us that we must address.
Cheers and I hope everyone had a great holiday season and New Year’s celebration with friends and family.
Matias
<3
because these tutorials are on my Todo list for quite some time and would like to help more people to stake link !