I haven't been in touch with reality for a while, and for the first time I decided to check Twitter and saw that a particular crypto project is trending.
It's called ARC network. I haven't taken my time to check out what the project is all about, but I heard they launched their mainnet yesterday, and a few hours after this launch they team behind the project decided to do a sort of livestream on twitter.
The livestream was about 4 team members and they were all four team members which all of them were Indian Devs.
So the moment investors in the ecosystem discovered that the Devs and team members were Indians, they started dumping their stake on the chain which dumped the price of every coin that was launched in the ecosystem.
It was a shitshow and a lot of people were making jest of the project and all that. Somehow I was sorry for the team member.
They may actually be good developers and just wanted to build a product that people can use, but they're building in a space where similar builders from their region have scammed thousands of people, and it's always difficult to shake off that stereotype sometimes.
I come from Nigeria, live in Nigeria and all that, and I can tell you that I've experienced racism, stereotype and all kinds of things.
I have asked people for help in the past, either onchain or off chain and and most times they just seems to want to say no, because of the things they've heard about Nigerians and all that.
It's probably one of the reasons why I don't ask people for help anymore, they either find an excuse or just try to deflate and instead of explaining, I just let people believe whatever they want.
In a world where stereotype is real, I think the only thing you can do is try as much as possible to show results. People are actually going to try to align with you irrespective of your race, nationality or region when it seems like you're no longer at the bottom of the barrel.
The issue with race being a thing always comes up when you're not adequate enough. For example, the CEO of Google is Indian, and at some people he also had to fight that stereotype, until he got to the level he got.
I doubt he actually gets these stereotype whenever he walks into a room, I mean, he's practically one of the richest people in the world and he's valuable enough to command respect and most of the time no one thinks of this.
I know a lot of Indians who are very rich in different professions as well, and Indians are some of the innovative people in the world as well. In reality race and nationality comes up when people do not belong to the upper echelon of life.
I doubt the likes of Barrack Obama ever gets racist remarks, even though he may face faced it in the past, he's gotten to that stage in life where he's probably not going to get it anymore. There are different types of stereotypes, personally I face a lot of them everyday, almost everyday I get reminded of them, and I think that's life.
Conclusion
The reality of the situation is that there are scammers everywhere, and scammers do not have nationalities, they're just people who choose to be greedy and being from one country does not change that, but honestly you cannot change how people feel about you, we cannot control how people want to judge anyone.
There will always scammers from our race or nationalities, those who just choose to be a stain to us, and there's nothing we can do to change them either. I've been scammed by people from different nationalities in the past, including people from my country.
However, it's understandable that one's experience can build a pattern in their minds of people, and this is probably how we tend to experience or become victims of stereotype. I hope the Devs of ARC, if they're actually genuine builders gets to bounce back.
One bad beans spoils the others. When I saw this post, the first thing that came into my mind is Nigeria. I doubt if any Nigerian will come up with any project that will go global and people will not question it.
This thing is just everywhere, people have lost so much in the wrong projects that have caused them to take caution. The slightest suspicion they perceived around any project, they don't hesitate to pull out their funds.
I feel sorry for those Indians, who knows their intentions was good and they probably planned to build something that will transform lives but the sins of others followed them.
I agree with you, showing works and evidence of genuine authenticity has the ability to erase one from bad records.
The truth is that the Indian project might as well be owned by scammers or owned by genuine builders. No one can exactly tell. If they turn out to be genuine, it'll be quite unfortunate that what happened to them, happened because of what other people have done that's now created a bad image for them.
As for Nigerians, we can see how it turned out with the yahoo boys thing and all that. I once asked helped for someone very close and they probably turned down my request for a help, probably because of the reputation of where I come from, so while I cannot blame them, we as people should generally learn to give others the benefit of a doubt
Honestly, I am skeptical about most new platforms because of all the people trying to get in and out before it drops. I hope the project does succeed, but it's hard to build trust after such a bad start.
Yeah, I think the project will probably not survive the FUD, people are obviously very scared, a lot of people have lost money to scam projects, and it's probably that PTSD that made many people react that way.
Bro, I read your post too. This stereotype and racism in crypto is indeed a harsh reality, thanks for sharing your thoughts