Original Title: "The Creator Who Took 1 Million Dollars from X, Once Posted a Memecoin"
Original Author: Eric, Foresight News
At 4:00 AM Beijing Time on February 4, 2025, X announced the results of its 1 million USD creator contest launched two weeks ago. This event was limited to U.S. users only, and participants needed to write an original article of at least 1,000 words. The article with the highest number of views on the "Home Timeline" for X's paid users will exclusively win the million-dollar prize.
With the precedent of "How to Completely Change Your Life in a Day" receiving 170 million views, everyone speculated that the award-winning article was likely another similar "chicken soup" piece. But the answer was unexpected yet reasonable.
Writing articles is more profitable than trading cryptocurrencies.
The creator of the X account named Beaver, became a millionaire through a single article. The article he wrote, "Deloitte, a $74 billion cancer metastasized across America," received 45 million views.
The award-winning article is an in-depth investigative report exposing a scandal of the U.S. government. Through public documents such as federal and state contracts, recorded breach incidents, lawsuits, audits, and so on, the author discovered a history of "corruption between officials and businesses" involving hundreds of billions of dollars: Deloitte has received a total of 40 billion U.S. dollars in contracts from the federal and state governments over the past 20 years, but the various systems it developed, including unemployment relief application systems, either caused hundreds of billions of dollars in phantom pay due to system vulnerabilities, or were simply dropped after the budget was increased several times.
In summary, the government spent 4 billion dollars on a system that ultimately caused a total loss of 3.4 billion dollars. More alarmingly, there is very frequent employee turnover between Deloitte and the U.S. government, allowing Deloitte to permeate every aspect of the government, "like cancer cells spreading into the bloodstream," continuously siphoning taxpayers' money into its own pockets, with no identifiable source and no way to eradicate it.
Looking into the Beaver account, you will find its main theme is "worrying about the country and the people," with topics almost all related to government, politics, and people's livelihood. In addition, Beaver has launched a website called SomaliScan, which collects public data on government budgets, expenditures, federal grants, and labor force, as well as a series of political-related information, including political donations. The relationship between Deloitte and government corruption was a conclusion drawn by analyzing these data.
On February 3, Beaver was still organizing the content from the massive "Epstein Files" to be published on the website into a complex relationship chart.
Interestingly, this political blogger issued a meme token SS (9NrkmoqwF1rBjsfKZvn7ngCy6zqvb8A6A5RfTvR2pump) for the website on January 2nd this year.BlockBeats reminds users: Meme coins have significant trading volatility, rely heavily on market sentiment and concept hype, and have no actual value or use cases; investors need to be aware of the risks.
This token had an unremarkable performance at its initial release, but after Beaver's article received tens of millions of views, it hit a阶段性 high on January 28th, and surged again today when the winners were announced. Compared to SS's poor performance and the $1 million prize, this might be a rare case where "writing articles earns more than trading tokens."
Beaver said on January 25 that the prize money for this competition will be fully used to purchase SS, 10% of the total SS is reserved for the hackathon, 20% is locked, and Beaver himself only kept 4.5%.
It is certain that Beaver is not a "crypto person," and the market cap of less than 4 million also indicates that this meme coin has little popularity. Those who spend real money to buy SS are likely mostly supporters of Beaver and SomaliScan. It is worth mentioning that the SomaliScan website also has a donation channel, supporting Bitcoin, Ethereum, SOL, and XMR donations. If you enjoy watching the drama and aren't afraid of making things worse, you can support this "democracy fighter" who dares to expose U.S. government scandals.
The common topic among netizens: politics, money, and feelings.
The Chinese internet has three evergreen topics: political developments, economic conditions / how to make money, and personal emotions.
The activity launched by X, which is only available to U.S. users, corresponds exactly to these three points for the top three:
· The article "Deloitte, a $74 Billion Cancer That Has Spread Across the United States" tells the story of corruption in the U.S. government;
· Runner-up article "Detailed Explanation of President Trump's Tariff Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Operate," derives an investment plan to cope with changes by analyzing the pattern of changes in Trump's tariff policies;
· Third place (the official favorite) article "The Complete Guide: How to Achieve Ultimate Focus," another self-improvement inspirational piece from Daniel Koe.
High-traffic Chinese articles on X also can't escape these topics.
If you read these articles carefully, you will find that they don't use particularly ornate language. They mostly present facts and explain reasoning, meeting the emotional or practical needs of readers. For creators, the conclusion is very simple: at least on platform X, if you want more exposure, you either tell a new story that nobody knows about, whether it's about yourself or a social issue; or you provide a detailed "how-to guide," whether it's about how to make money, how to adjust your mindset, or even, as shown in the picture above, how to find numbers.
Click to learn about Lüdòng BlockBeats' open positions
Welcome to join the official community of Lvdong BlockBeats:
Telegram subscription group:https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram discussion group:https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter account:https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia