How CryptoGPT was valued at $250 million overnight

On April 11, several reports surfaced online that a startup called CryptoGPT had an overnight valuation of $250 million. The company, led by CTO and co-founder Dejan Eria, achieved this high valuation thanks to funding from DWF Labs and will actually join the list of the most valuable new cryptocurrency startups. But even the estimated $10 million in funding is suspect – DWF Labs could have increased its valuation to a quarter of a billion dollars simply by buying 4% of the company.

The CryptoGPT platform combines all the current trends: blockchain, AI, NFT, zkRollups, second-tier solutions. Regular users are also attracted to these trends. They are promised to monetize personal data by selling it to large artificial intelligence companies. Whether it’s fitness, dating or gaming data. And, of course, activity data is packaged into NFT and can be traded by offering it to the big players (Google, Amazon) in the AI market. It turns out to be a passive income for life.

But how technically perfect is the CryptoGPT platform? And what is this “investment” by DWF Labs?

Actually, this funding is only about buying GPT tokens, which have been on the market for some time. According to The Block, only $420,000 worth of tokens have been purchased so far, and $10 million is expected to be invested over a 285-day period. So DWF Labs is not a classic investor, but actually a token trader and market maker for new coins. NFT is also not there yet, they are due April 25 – with a target market of South Korea. In any case, you have to buy GPT tokens to get NFT.

The GPT tokens themselves have been around for a long time – they were launched in March 2023. They are, of course, not their own blockchain, but just tokens running on Ethereum (ERC-20), Binance Chain (BEP-20) and Arbitrum (ARB-20). Creating such tokens is not particularly difficult, the same way SHIBA INUs work. In any case, the GPT token works better. Since its all-time high on March 17, GPT has lost more than 50% of its value.

Who’s behind CryptoGPT

For a while, Jamila Jelani was listed as the startup’s CEO and founder, then her title was changed to “Marketer” on the site, and then Jelani’s information disappeared from the site. The claim that Jelani had once implemented marketing campaigns for the Chinese company Alibaba also could not be confirmed. The resume of CTO and founder Dejan Erja is also questionable – the site says he worked at Ripple, but his Linkedin profile has no record of this stage in his career (which is important for the crypto sector).

The claim that CryptoGPT apps have more than 2 million users also raises questions. The app is only available for Android, and there are only over 100,000 downloads on the Google Play Store. The iPhone app, which appears on the site, does not yet exist. The fact that GPT tokens can be traded only on decentralized exchanges (Uniswap, Pancakeswap) and two exchanges Bithumb and Bitfinex, but not on the market leaders such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, also speaks for itself.

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