Brando and Dokyo

The grift that keeps on grifting

Lately Brando has been on his crashout arc, attempting to dethrone Cryptofish as the crashout-king of Avax.

I wrote this article to crystalize a piece of Avax lore for future generations, and to serve as a warning for anyone who is thinking of buying into whatever grift he works on next.

The before times

I don’t know much about what Brandi was up to before he got to Avalanche. I’ve heard rumblings that he ran some kind of NFT pump and dump group on Solana, but I guess he wasn’t that important since I’ve never been able to find a first hand source who could comment on it for me.

Anyway, we once had this conversation which seems to align with that, you can take your own conclusions from it.

Dokyo

Pre-launch

It’s an open secret that Dokyo was funded from the ground up by a grant. The goal was to attract some attention to the ecosystem from SOL/ETH people and to try to kick off an NFT season in conjunction with the Hyperspace launch.

As part of this, Brawndo reached out to a bunch of KOLs to offer them, gasp, a DISCOUNTED PRESALE to mint Dokyo. On top of that, the money was collected as USDC on SOL or ETH instead of AVAX, how scandalous!

As a niche micro influencer with a tech blog, I was of course included. But I find it hilarious, given the state of things, that Branduh once launched a presale that went out of his way to include KOLs who never posted about it.

But between the slick marketing videos, the ecosystem backing, and the seemingly high quality art for the project, it was likely that this would be a decent gamble.

Launch

The launch did not go well. Hyperspace had issues (surprise!) that affected the ability of people to mint. A combination of this outage, high mint price, and malaise over the market caused minting to stall out after a few minutes.

This is typically the kiss of death for a project; when it doesn’t mint out, people start listing below mint price, and a downward spiral occurs.

Fortunately, a hero arose!

Someone minted 10K avax worth of Dokyo. A very diamond handed someone. So diamond handed, they hold to this day.

It completed minting out shortly after 20% of the NFTs were bulk minted by this user.

Sidenote: what about Joepegs?

Until this point, Joepegs was the place that most new projects launched. So you might wonder why Dokyo launched on this new, poorly tested, honestly kind of shitty marketplace?

Well, it turns out that a few people from the Joepegs team talked shit about Brando in a Telegram chat that actually included Brando. Whoops!

Post-launch

This was an exciting time for Dokyo! ‘Successful’ mintout, basically maintaining floor at mint price, Avalabs employees wearing Dokyo PFPs!

Lots of talk about how holo masks got you access to an ‘alpha’ chat! Someone buys one for 400A! Plans for the future! Noodles!

The mint proceeds were nuked from Avax to stables between Sept 22 and Sept 25, at approximately $9 AVAX.

Right before the bull market returned. Oof. Truly astonishing how accurately they managed to bottom tick it.

Hyperspace era

The thing that really boosted Dokyo as a project was the launch of Hyperspace Trading Rewards. Under this incentive structure, users were encouraged to wash trade their Dokyo (and other NFTs, but primarily Dokyo) with the understanding that they would be rewarded some multiple of the fees they paid.

Although Hyperspace paid a fixed .5% creator royalty, the massive volume created by these incentives resulted in an enormous influx of money to Dokyo as a project. They actually received even more than they minted for, in USD terms. At one point, they were earning $15K per day in royalties.

It also drove the floor price of a Dokyo up to something like 60A, worth more than 1 ETH at the peak.

Slow decline into irrelevance

What goes up must come down. With the end of the incentive programs, the volume dried up, and those 60A Dokyo crashed down to as low as 3A.

Of course the mania was never going to last, but the project wasn’t doing itself any favors.

What went wrong

More like, what went right? Or perhaps, what happened at all?

Noodles

Brambo’s big promise was that Dokyo would ‘disrupt the noodle market’. Which is, frankly, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. And I am old.

Unsurprisingly, nothing ever came out of this. Ignoring the fact that making noodles for an NFT project is a ridiculous idea, feels like it should be pretty obvious that creating and distributing a food product is a complicated and costly endeavor.

I suppose if your life experience is ‘barber and NFT founder’ maybe you lack the intuition necessary to warn you away from a plan like that.

The best way to learn is to try and fail! Lots of failing going on here. Less clear how much trying is happening.

Team

My understanding is that the studio that created the Dokyo art was contracted to do the work, and then departed. There was, at the start, a community manager? Not for long, I assume, given the amount of activity in this community.

For reference, I count 15 posts on Dokyo’s Twitter from launch until earlier this month, and more than half (9) of those posts happened prior to Dokyo launching.

So confusing. How do you know what you’re doing wrong, and still not take any action to rectify it?

What team changes are we talking about here? Did anyone ever get hired? But why does he even need to hire someone? Just post yourself, Brandope.

Merch

They did manage to ship some merch! They shipped (checks notes) a few jackets?

Hope Dokyo holders are thrilled that they managed to hand out some merch to random girls in Japan.

So they handed out some t-shirts at conferences and a few jackets to special people. What a fantastic run! Hope all of you Dokyo holders managed to fly to Japan to get your free t-shirt. After all, isn’t that what NFT projects are about?

Conference hopping

So Brandork didn’t actually work much on Dokyo. What was he doing with his spare time? Traveling the world, obviously. What else do founders do with your mint funds?

Fantastic.

I see a lot of connecting and collaborating. Really bringing the Dokyo brand into the spotlight. Huge value add.

He’s BD-ing, bro

One retort that Brandull likes to use is that he ‘brings attention and projects to the ecosystem’.

Where are all these projects? The only one that he points to publicly (correctly or not, who knows) is NFT Inspect.

Famously shitty NFT Inspect. Bargain bin Kaito. The project that told people who complained that their PFP wasn’t being recognized to reboot their computer. Their algorithm was so bad that they had people typing one-word replies to shitty KOLs to try and boost their leaderboard ranking.

How about Hyperspace? I believe he’s at least partly responsible for them. Hello? Hyperspace, are you home? Are the servers still running? Can someone page Bryan?

What about Looty (the original Looty team, not the new one). Remember the bottom of the barrel SOL scumbags Looty? I wrote a 4-part series on how shitty they are Looty?

Fantastic BD work buddy.

Fwog arc

This isn’t that funny but I found it really ridiculous that he spent so much time bullposting Fwog instead of posting about his own fucking project.

Founder mode

Let’s not forget all the valuable inspirational quotes he has ChatGPT’d over the last year to keep us all motivated.

This one is so topical too, I love it.

This shit is a failure, obviously

What’s amazing about this whole thing is that it didn’t have to be such a complete failure. They had great art, strong backing from the ecosystem, and an insane amount of incentives/funding funneled to them.

He just… didn’t do anything. That’s the whole story. Complete abandonment of the project in order to fuck around in Asia for a year. Hired professional photographers to follow him around and watch him jerk off.

I mean, I can see why. Who wouldn’t accept $700K to travel around Japan, Korea, and (presumably) fuck ladyboys in Thailand? All while doing a copious amount of drugs (presumably).

I assume the drugs, because I don’t understand how you could be so delusional about everything without them.

For Christ’s sake, the guy doesn’t even remember what his own collection looks like at this point. He confused an honorary from another collection with his own.

Finally up to date

Wow! That was a long story. Given how badly he failed, you’d think he would slink away into the night, right? Well, sadly, it seems like Brandnope’s Dokyo royalties have fallen upon hard times.

All cashed out! No more AVAX to send to Kucoin to nuke for ladyboy and cocaine funds. You know what that means?

I can’t wait for Dokyoke to launch. I NEED this energy drink. Or memecoin. Or NFT. Who can say? I assume there’s a plan! No plan for Dokyo for the last year, but definitely a plan now for this thing.

That’s right, Brenda is BACK baby. And he’s ready to grift, again. He’s got a CM who has been spicy on the timeline and some Fiverr artists (better than Chef Goose’s) to make some new shitty inspirational videos.

Attacks on, well, everybody

As part of his coming out special initiative, Blandork has been slinging shit at literally everyone who has been (unlike him) actually doing things. Anything to get some attention I guess, even if it’s not positive.

Well, let’s be fair. Nobs and ChefGoose probably had it coming. They’ve been dunking on him continuously for the last year, and he mostly ignored them, which takes a remarkable amount of restraint. But, again to be fair, all of those dunks were justified. The guy has literally done NOTHING, and he deserves all the shit he got.

There are so many funny things about this crash out (is it a crashout? or is this a media stunt?) that it’s going to be hard for me to get them all. I’ll do my best!

Public reaction

I laugh every time I read the replies to one of his posts. I’m just going to grab a random one right now and I’ll tally up the sentiment really quickly.

Ahaha, this one is so funny. Mom! I’m a gatekeeper! I decide who wins and loses! Mom, he caught me botting mints! He must not read my substack, where I wrote about it, which makes me sad. Maybe he’ll read this one?

Anyway, lets review the stats:

• 146 ‘Likes’ (totally real people)

• 56 comments

  • Negative: 46

  • Neutral: 5

  • Positive: 2

  • Inconclusive: 2

• All 5 quote tweets are negative

Fascinating. Almost seems like his socials are botted!

And here you can see Blandoh’s alt talking to Brandslow’s alt.

Every accusation is a confession

Ignoring the fact that I have tweeted repeatedly to make fun of the stupid shit Branflake has said, this ‘send Discord minions attack’ line is SO FUNNY.

No one has ever sent anyone to attack him… because there’s no need to. Everyone hates him. The community thinks he’s a literal clown. If he posts something, an army of people will dunk on him of their own volition, no coordination necessary.

He doesn’t understand this because he has no friends. No one comments in support of him, because no one supports him. He has bots reply to his posts and like them. He assumes anyone who is against him must be paid, just like his bots are paid.

Comedy gold

I can’t get over this one where the guy he quote tweets tells him that he’s wrong about his interpretation and then his response is to attack him.

Chain analyzoooor

He’s also discovered Arkham, and I am LOVING this arc.

Yeah that’s right buddy, I bought 25K of ‘WWW.TETHER.COM’.

Stealthy dumping devs

It’s hilarious how hypocritical and inconsistent the accusations are.

I can’t believe I gave myself up like that. How could I know that by creating dashboards that show who is selling, my own selling would be revealed! Foiled again.

Of course, the idea that ‘discovering’ the behavior of someone who built a dashboard that exposes that behavior USING that dashboard might be a tad bit inconsistent is simply too much for Brandont to process.

Do you think he ever figured it out? The math might be a bit too hard for him.

Creepy as fuck

I actually came back to edit this in after publication when someone reminded me. I can’t be the only one who gets a weird, creepy, sexual vibe from this kind of talk right?

KOLs with back-channel

Brandslow has some very strong opinions on KOLs getting into presales. Which is why I find it hilarious that he didn’t bother trying to apply to Blub.

Instead, he DM’d someone trying to get in after applications had already closed.

I’m sure Branfaux appreciates the upstanding integrity of that person trying to preserve the fairness of the process and that it has no impact on his current crashout arc.

This post is soooo looong

I think I’m going to have to cut it off here.

The TLDR is that Branslow got handed a shit ton of money, fucked ladyboys/snorted coke/partied at conferences for a year, and is now spending more effort crashing out on other people than he ever did for his holders.

For fucks sake man. What were you DOING ALL THIS TIME. You had all this creative talent and you just sat on it! We could have been enjoying this clipart the whole time!

Anyway, fair warning that he’s a grifter and grifter’s gonna grift. I assume this latest crashout is just a way for him to justify abandoning Dokyo, probably so he can launch some new scam.

Can’t wait to see what it is!