Advertisers discover the EOS blockchain

photo credit Pina Messina from Unsplash.com

It looks like advertisers are rediscovering an old trick — free money — to gain attention. This time the ad message arrives as an EOS transfer memo.

Four time in the past two weeks I have been sent free EOS. Each time the amount was tiny, 0.0001 EOS (worth $0.000553 in today’s down market). This is not your standard EOS airdrop, where new applications built on the EOS network are building a community by giving away tokens. The EOS is there only to carry the text message.

Each free transfer comes with a message in the memo line, written in Chinese. The four each come from a different sender, with a different message. With a little help from Google Translate, here are the four messages in English (punctuation added for clarity):

“Undertake blockchain airdrop advertising. Used for blockchain projects, public numbers, nodes and other promotion. The lowest price in the whole network, 150 yuan can be put into 10,000 EOS user names, there is a need to contact > WeChat: [account name]”

“Add WeChat [account name] to receive the EOS game Taiken Planet Benefits. Register to send 100 tokens, play games every day to mine the money, irregular candy drop. Tyken Planet, the world's first eos game Dapp [web site].”

“EOS interest-free loan, limited to 5,000! [web link] official website [web link] customer service WeChat: [account name]”

“Come to EOS Force to receive the creation of EosCoin, participate in the voting to get the money every day! Now vote for the eosgod super node once full 100 can immediately return the prize, Xiaosuo small return to the big shuttle!”

So, one is an advertisement for ad placement, one is for a game, one is for loans, and I’m not really sure if EOS Force is offering something legal. I looked up the first one and saw that it was sent to 4,750 EOS holders. Which means at today’s EOS price it cost $0.475 (plus the cost of staking enough EOS to send the transfers) to send a short message to almost 5,000 EOS coin holders. Not a bad price to send messages to such a precisely defined market.

I would not be surprised to see this escalate into more than thousandths of coin per message. It is not a new advertising trick; I’ve seen dimes and $1 bills in the mail over the years from junk mail advertisers trying to stand out.