Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

Last night, Circle's Arc public chain held a live stream for its mainnet launch, and when the event entered the team and developer presentation segment, several developers with South Asian faces appeared on the screen.

Then, crypto investors were scared.

"This is @arc's team, should I be worried? They told me to sell," said a Portuguese investor.

Another KOL bluntly stated: "I just sold everything I had on @arc after seeing this live stream."

The Meme coins and related platform tokens on the Arc chain experienced massive sell-offs in the following 12 hours, with some tokens dropping by 40% to 75%. The community discussions repeatedly featured the same sentence in both English and Chinese: "When Indian people appear, Meme coins die."

This is not prejudice, this is post-traumatic stress reaction.

Before hurrying to criticize the community for "racial discrimination," let's look at a set of data.

BitConnect (2016-2018): One of the most notorious Ponzi schemes in crypto history. Founder Satish Kumbhani, from Gujarat, 35 years old. Defrauded investors of about 2.4 billion dollars.

The brainwashing video "Hey hey hey! Bitconneeeeect!" is still one of the most widely circulated Memes in the crypto circle. Kumbhani fled after being charged by the FBI and has yet to be apprehended. Another promoter from India, Divyesh Darji, was arrested at Delhi airport, with the amount involved estimated at about 12.7 billion dollars.

GainBitcoin (2014-2018): The largest crypto scam in India. Founder Amit Bhardwaj promised a 10% monthly return on BTC investments, raising between 385,000 to 600,000 bitcoins, worth approximately 3 to 4.7 billion dollars at the time. More than 100,000 investors were affected. Amit Bhardwaj died while in detention in 2022, and his brother Ajay is still under investigation.

WazirX (2024): India's largest crypto exchange was hacked, with losses of 235 million dollars. Although the hacker was North Korea's Lazarus Group, WazirX faced extensive criticism in its aftermath handling, and user funds have not been fully restored; founder Nischal Shetty faces numerous complaints.

According to CoinIndex statistics, since 2015, Indian investors have lost over 7.2 trillion rupees (around 8.6 billion dollars) in crypto scams. In 2024 alone, related complaints exceeded 3.64 million.

This list can go on: Morris Coin, ATC Coin, OctaFX, HPZ Token... each name represents real monetary losses and real victims.

The crypto community's reflex against South Asian faces did not emerge from thin air. It has been "trained" by billions of dollars in real losses. Calling it prejudice is not wrong, but a more accurate description might be: post-traumatic stress reaction.

Back to the Arc live stream scene.

The panic trigger in the community, besides the faces, also included the quality of the visuals and the background.

The rough set design stood in stark contrast to the upscale chain, knowing that Circle behind it is a publicly traded company regulated under US federal law, holding compliance licenses from multiple countries.

These two signals combined triggered the stereotype of a rug pull.

But the Indian brothers standing in front of the camera are truly wronged.

India has one of the largest developer communities in the world. IIT produces more engineering talents each year than the combined output of MIT and Stanford. CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Adobe all come from India; Polygon's co-founder Sandeep Nailwal is also from India. In Ethereum's core developer community, South Asian contributors have never been in the minority.

If "seeing Indian faces in live streams = sell" becomes an unwritten rule of the industry, then this industry is pushing one of its largest talent pools out the door with prejudice.

That being said, in a market where a Meme coin can drop 75% in 30 seconds due to a live stream screenshot, perhaps "face trading" is the most honest pricing mechanism, and that itself is a Meme.