The Crossroads of the Crypto Industry: from "Meme carnival" to Value Reconstruction

Single mother Violet's voice is still trembling. The 400,000 yuan education fund prepared for her daughter is now less than 30,000 yuan after the collapse of trust - this AI scam using Nvidia's technology halo as bait is subverting the foundation of trust in the crypto world.

The perfect kill for the technical butcher

On January 24, 2025, a tweet ignited the crypto community. Nvidia core engineer Travis Cline (@traviscline) released a token called TMC Corp (TMC).

His resume is perfect: LinkedIn shows that he is not only a core member of Nvidia's AI team, but also a founding engineer of the acquired Brev.dev; his GitHub account has 5,500 stars, and his open source project langchaingo is regarded as a benchmark by developers. Thousands of investors quickly poured in, and TMC's market value quickly reached more than 20 million US dollars. However, Travis quickly deleted the tweet shortly afterwards, causing TMC's price to plummet in a short period of time.

But not long after, Travis announced on Twitter: "TMC - a revolutionary experiment of crowdfunding open source AI tools." Everyone realized that this was not a meme coin, but an open source AI tool project issued by NVIDIA core team members to raise funds from the public. At the same time, crypto KOL @OKRenaissance verified with Travis himself through private channels and confirmed that the token was issued by him. When everyone knew that TMC was issued by Travis himself, TMC was snapped up in the market again, and its market value surged to more than 30 million US dollars.

Just when everyone thought they had invested in a promising AI project, the situation changed unexpectedly. Several addresses that purchased very early began to sell off their shares crazily, and many addresses that purchased very early began to sell off their shares in large quantities. According to incomplete statistics, the profits exceeded 3 million US dollars. "This is not a mistake, but a carefully designed harvest." The on-chain detective @MelarDev found that these operations were likely premeditated. At the same time, many victims also bought TMC counterfeit coins. Because the hacker sent the TMC counterfeit coins to Travis' wallet, Travis immediately sold all the TMC counterfeit coins and only used a small amount of SOL to buy back the real TMC coins. He recharged the remaining SOL defrauded from all the victims to the centralized exchange and put it into his own pocket.

After that, dozens of investors tried various channels but received no response from Travis. When investors flocked to Discord to question him, Travis rudely removed these people from the channel and deleted all their messages, leaving a sentence "I regret dealing with crypto people" and disappeared.

At this point, the price of TMC has fallen by more than 94%, almost to zero.

"Nvidia's brand is more effective than any white paper"

After losing contact, Travis even recently tweeted in a mocking tone that he had left the project, leaving investors in a mess to pay for his harvest.

Klose is a recent college graduate who has been working for less than a year. He invested the money he earned from working in TMC because he believed that this was a crowdfunding project released by NVIDIA's real-name core developers and that there would be actual products behind it. He bought $11,000 worth of TMC tokens in succession, and as of today, he has lost more than 90%. He told us that he doesn't even know how to pay the rent for the next quarter.

Violet is a salesperson in the traditional industry and the mother of a 3-year-old daughter. She saw Travis' LinkedIn profile and that he worked for NVIDIA, so she thought he would continue to support and develop his crowdfunding project, so she learned about and bought TMC on the Solana chain for the first time. In 6 days, she lost more than $50,000 in TMC tokens, which was her entire salary plus sales commission for a year and a half. Now she can only sleep normally with the help of drugs.

Roger is one of the largest individual investors in the TMC project, and also the biggest loser. To quote Roger, he has made many investments in both the primary and secondary markets, and he doesn’t care if the project fails after trying hard, because this is the risk that innovation should take. But innovation and fraud are two different things. Tens of thousands of people choose to support you with real money, but you delete their messages, kick them out of the community, refuse to communicate, and make profits by selling tokens. This is a naked fraud.

Roger said that if his and other TMC holders' reasonable demands are still not responded to, he and other TMC holders in the Bay Area will go to Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters for a protest march, and he is ready to join many $TMC defra