PRIA WARS: Attack of the DeFi Clones

PRIA’s (short) History

A few weeks ago PRIA was released. 🎉🎉🎉

PRIA exploded out of the gates, immediately pumping to ~$8 before making a much needed correction, with price dropping down to ~$1.50. 

For a few days there was a lull.

Price consolidated in the $2–3 range, and after some substantial marketing efforts from the team, the project was picked up by Crypto Twitter and Telegram influencers. PRIA became the talk of the town and started to pump AGAIN.

It was #1 on Dextools continually, and over the course of a few days the price pumped from $2 to $82. 

Each time we woke in the morning, the PRIA price had risen by $15–20!

It was exciting. It was euphoric. Lambo dealerships smashed pre-order records. Some investors went to the moon. Some to mars. Some tore a hole in the fabric of spacetime and hopped thru’ a wormhole. The money making machine showed no signs of stopping.

But then, something happened. The inevitable happened. Hell emptied itself of evil and PRIA suffered from… The Attack of the Clones.

PRIA’s trading volume was juicy and the clones came to feast.

Hell is empty and all the PRIA clones are here. ~William Shakespeare

As mentioned, this was inevitable and expected. The DeFi space is filled with clones. Many of these clones come without any innovation whatsoever. These low quality clones seek to vampirically leach on the success of the project they’re cloning by capitalising in on the hype of the moment.

For obvious reasons, DeFi clones without innovation often die a rapidly painful death, or, become rug pulls. And though some early clone investors make big gains, many people lose everything. It is NOT worth the risk.

The following is what happened to the PRIA clones.

ARIA

Though clones are expected in DeFi, the first clone is always the most painful. And this was no exception, the first PRIA clone, ARIA, stung a lot.

The ARIA team cloned absolutely everything, including the layout of the website AND the logo! Everything. The only changes they made were:

1. Reducing the total supply by half
2. Changing the name PRIA to ARIA.

To add to the irritation, one of the main orchestrators of the ARIA clone attack was a fairly vocal and ‘trusted’ member of the community Kevin C, who is an Admin for a legit project some of us really like: Contribute.

I wonder why!?!?

Prior to the clone, we were a little suspicious of Kevin C as he mentioned that he “missed out on investing early in PRIA”, yet he still hung around in our Telegram channel, always with comments that resembled gentle FUD.

As he was the Admin of Contribute we gave him a free pass (‘trustworthy’), which was a mistake.

Beware of fudders, folks. They are resentful people, often jealous because they didn’t make the money they wished, and they will harm your project. Best case scenario is that they annoy people in your channel. Worst case scenario is that they clone your whole project.

And so it happened with ARIA.

Naturally, we were pissed and took a number of actions to discredit their project and protect our own. PRIA WARS: Attack of the Clones began, and the PRIA Jedi gathered together and headed to the frontline for war.

Let the battle commence…

As a first counter attack, Jedi Master Dr Mantis (PRIA creator) triggered the manager killswitch function on their project.

Since they copied the code verbatim and didn’t change dates nor contract addresses, Jedi Master Mantis was able to immediately stop their code from being editable (full Defi, baby!) by interacting with their smart contract and triggering the manager killswitch. This resulted in a liquidity leak, and ARIA was burned every time trades were made with Uniswap. 🔥🔥🔥

Next step was rather bold, and some might say, brash. But, as the saying goes: all is fair in love and war… and this was war!

We, the PRIA Jedi, banned everyone from our PRIA Telegram channel who had joined the ARIA Telegram channel, and Jedi Master Mantis blacklisted any ethereum addresses that had interacted with the ARIA smart contract.

This caused quite the stir.

People did NOT like being removed from the PRIA Telegram channel, but an example needed to be set. People soon realised that the PRIA Jedi do NOT play games.

Classic degens, unaware of why we might be pissed.

Next, the PRIA Jedi took to Twitter and Telegram and, pardon my language, fudded the fuck out of them. They had unforgivably taken a significant portion of our trade volume and we were determined to disrupt their initial success and get it back.

Every single Twitter post they made was immediately hit with a plethora of negative comments from the PRIA Jedi, and similarly in their Telegram.

It worked.

Regular people who weren’t the PRIA Jedi organically started asking whether ARIA was a scam in their Telegram. We were winning.

ARIA did attempt to fight back a couple of times on Twitter…

Some minor, yet futile, resistance.

…but it was futile. The PRIA Jedi were simply too strong and spammed the above post with factual and brutally honest FUD concerning the ARIA project.

As one would expect, this rather quickly led to the demoralising of ARIA Telegram channel members…

…And ARIA started to die a painful death with volume dropping sharply.

The beginning of the end…

The PRIA Jedi conquered, and ARIA is no more.

A price chart from Hell.

Open the Floodgates

After ARIA, the Attack of the Clones continued, and war intensified. Multiple clones every single day were created.

ORIA, KRIA, VRIA, ZRIA, TRIA, RRIA, BRIA, yPRIA, pizzeRIA, DRIA, nDRIA, etc, etc… I mean, WTF!!

Many of them followed the same model as ARIA, by cloning everything and changing very little. Most are too boringly similar to call out individually.

Though DRIA did have an interesting logo…

Hahahaha! With a logo like that, DRIA wasn’t a cause for concern.

Initially our strategy remained the same: Attack them head on. Ban them, blacklist them, FUD them, trigger the killswitch.

But it quickly became apparent that, although we are PRIA Jedi Knights, we didn’t have the bandwidth to fight them all. We adapted our strategy, moving towards automation and turning the clones on themselves.

In addition to the bandwidth issues, we also realised that since the clones were also competing with each other, and each clone community has essentially the same degenerate ethos, it wouldn’t be too long before they started cannibalising themselves, leaving PRIA to reign supreme.

Adapting strategy

For ‘automation’, Jedi Master Mantis wrote an alert system that analysed all smart contract diffs. If the contract was similar to PRIA, it would immediately execute the killswitch to ensure a liquidity leak and an eventual death.

For our FUD efforts, instead of generically fudding, we started to directly FUD the clones by promoting other clone projects! We did this in the Twitter and Telegram channels of the separate clone projects.

This catalysed the clone cannibalism we hoped.

Soon members from each of the clone projects started fudding each other, leading the eventual destruction of them all.

First it started with regular old ‘sweary’ FUD…

Then the discourse became a little more colourful…

"Goats", you say?

Even Admins started berating each other. Here’s our good friend Kevin C again arguing with another Admin, KDOT, but this time with a different clone project: nDRIA!

Gotta give it to Kevin C, he knows how to pick a shitty project! 😂

And finally, our favourite: A beautiful crescendo of porn spamming…

The PRIA Jedi won the first wave of war.

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle” ~ Sun Tzu

Oscillate

After the 7–10 day Attack of the Clones, things slowed down a little bit and the clones were attacking with less frequency.

Witnessing the total clone destruction from the PRIA Jedi, some clones regrouped, ready to launch another attack.

This attack came in the form of a clone 2.0 named Oscillate. They had put in some effort beyond a straight copy and paste of the code. They seemingly meant business. 😮

Oscillate actually launched their OWN uniquely designed website and significantly changed the name. And as all the other clones did, they made some rudimentary modifications to some of the math regarding the burn rate and maximum supply.

This clone 2.0 was going places. Lol.

Their OWN website. Wow!

If any clone had a chance of becoming successful it felt like it would be this one.

In addition their website and name, they had a ton of degens shilling in their Telegram. They reached an impressive ~1000 members within a day! And they also fixed the contract code to stop us from triggering the killswitch. 😬

However, rather hilariously, after a few hours any concerns we had about Oscillate were alleviated upon noticing that one of the Admins of their Telegram group was a braindead fudder from our own PRIA Telegram channel a week earlier!

When we were pumping hard in the previous week, with price going from $2 to $82, an imbecilic degen named Lord Fes came into the PRIA Telegram and started calling everyone “cunts” and spamming masturbating-Pepe and Nazi-Pepe memes. According to him, he did this because we “mooned without him”.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce the singular brain-celled, Lord Fes…

Lord Fes isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

As I mentioned. Be careful with fudders and deal with them swiftly. Lord Fes lasted about 60 seconds in our channel.

As expected, any project that would appoint Lord Fes as an Admin would not last for long, and this was no exception. Oscillate died a horrible death, just like all the rest.

See?

Another price chart from Hell.

Much like real life clones, DeFi clones suffer a similar fate: A significantly shortened lifespan and painfully tragic death. ~Jedi Master Mantis 

PRIAx

After countless battles and a week or so of intense combat, it felt that PRIA WARS: Attack of the Clones had reached its conclusion… 

The good guys (us) had won. 🙌

But, no.

There was a last hurrah. We came up against a new clone, PRIAx.

PRIAx was created by another of our previous community members, Dominik. For a few weeks Dominik had been a member of the PRIA Telegram channel, and he frequently complained and fudded. We were too tolerant, however, and we warned him numerous times and continued to keep him around. Every so often he would intersperse his FUD with positivity and optimism, and that was enough to forgive him for a few hours.

And, to be honest, it really seemed like he was just a very emotional (perhaps bipolar) guy whose mood was exponentially correlated with the price of PRIA. If the PRIA price went down slightly, Dominik’s mood crashed worse than the Wall St Crash of 1929. If PRIA price went up slightly, his mood elevated like he’d just triple dropped whilst clubbing in Ibiza.

His mood swings resulted in him insinuating that the project was a scam and other such FUD. And eventually, after a few days of negative PRIA price action, he couldn’t contain himself. His mood crashed and he repeatedly fudded.

He didn’t heed our warnings, and continued…

The community didn’t like it, we received multiple requests to ban him. We felt we’d been lenient enough, and so we muted him to give us all a break for a couple of days.

That break didn’t come, however…

As the next day, PRIAx emerged. Dominik was the Admin and he claimed that PRIAx was actually created by us! Check it out…

Well, this was… hilarious! Loyalty rarely exists in the DeFi world. 😢

So, I repeat: Be very wary of fudders, folks. They lack emotional restraint and are prone to destructive behaviour. They will hurt your project.

We knew PRIAx wouldn’t be successful. This may sound like arrogance, but it was obvious. The PRIAx website was also selling COVID testing kits! 😂

A few days later, Dominik sent one of the PRIA Jedi a direct message to apologise, but the damage had already been done.

Regardless, we wish Dominik the best in life.

The End

That’s all, folks! (For now!)

But just wait for the next time PRIA pumps! A second wave of clones will come, this time stronger than before, again in an attempt to dethrone the king.

They forget that there is only one PRIA.

PRIA WARS: Attack of the Clones taught us a lot and showed us just how robust PRIA actually is. The 1 million test simulations prior to launching the PRIA project certainly paid off, because, PRIA Jedi aside, the minor modifications the clones made to the math would NOT have worked anyway.

To compete with PRIA, the clone must reinforce and weaponise itself with purposeful and meticulous innovation. Perhaps such a clone will emerge in the future... 🤖

Stay tuned for the sequel: PRIA WARS 2: Return of the Clones.

If you’d like to explore the PRIA protocol you can visit the website and join our thriving Telegram community.