Original author: Fairy, ChainCatcher
Original editor: TB, ChainCatcher
Yet another manipulation scandal has surfaced, this time it’s Crypto Beast.
The big KOL with nearly 800,000 fans was shouting orders to create momentum while pulling up the market, shipping goods, and reaping the profits.
On July 14, the token Altcoin (ALT) promoted by Crypto Beast plummeted from $0.19 to $0.003, and its market value evaporated by nearly $190 million in just a few hours. 45 wallets associated with him on the chain sold the token simultaneously, cashing out a total of more than $11 million.
This article will review the complete process of this harvesting event and reveal the truth behind the operation.
ALT Collapse: Crypto Beast’s Manipulation Puzzle
From skyrocketing to plummeting, it only took five days. On July 9, Crypto Beast began to intensively promote ALT on X and Telegram. He described the token as the next 100x coin and billion-dollar market value potential, and with the gradual pull-up rhythm, he continued to create market FOMO sentiment.
On July 12, the price-pulling action accelerated significantly. In just two days, $ALT soared from $0.039 to $0.19, an increase of nearly 4 times, attracting more retail investors to flock in.
On July 14, the harvest officially began. In just 4 hours, $ALT fell to $0.003, a drop of 94%, almost to zero.
Image source: coingecko
The on-chain detective ZachXBT conducted an in-depth investigation and uncovered the true face of the entire operation through a wallet address that Crypto Beast had previously made public.
This wallet was initially funded through an instant exchange. ZachXBT further performed a time correlation analysis of the funds flow path and eventually tracked it to a key Celestia address:
celestia1chflqywwp0k8rjzgp3w4447fquyk9ynnc6zws5
The investigation showed that the address sent small amounts of funds to multiple instant exchange platforms (such as KuCoin Nested, SideShift, Binance Nested, HTX Nested, etc.) between May and July 2025 to fund side wallets.
These side wallets are not unrelated accounts, but rather a “bundled wallet cluster” that ZachXBT confirmed through on-chain analysis. They simultaneously sold $ALT on July 14, cashing out a total of more than $11 million.
Below is a table of instant Celestia to Solana swaps identified through time analysis:
In addition to these 45+ wallets that are highly tied to Crypto Beast funds, there is also an independent sniper cluster that sold more than $2.6 million and is associated with $ALT deployers. But in terms of influence and funding scale, Crypto Beast seems to be the protagonist.
Currently, there are still multiple wallets related to Crypto Beast holding more than 89 million $ALT, accounting for about 10% of the total supply. After the incident, Crypto Beast has deleted the tweets promoting ALT and cancelled the X account.
ZachXBT pointed out that this is not the first time that Crypto Beast has done this. In many previous projects, including $ALPHA, $RICH, $YE, $RUG, $ACE, and $JOHN, he has adopted a similar bundled pull-up and cash-out model, causing many early followers to suffer heavy losses.
The KOLs whose reputations have collapsed in those years
Crypto Beast’s approach is not an isolated case, but a microcosm of the “operating script” that is common in the Web3 world.
With their huge number of fans and influence, KOLs can often easily stir up a wave of hype, but behind the scenes they may be deeply bound with the deployers and initial coin holders, quietly catching all the retail investors in one fell swoop.
In the past few years, ZachXBT has exposed several similar harvesting cases:
BitBoy (Ben Armstrong): A well-known crypto YouTube blogger who has long been collecting soft advertising fees from projects to promote virtual coins and altcoins. He has promoted MYX, DISTX, ETHY, LOCK and other runaway tokens.
Logan Paul: A well-known internet celebrity boxer who used a wallet under his name to buy low-priced tokens or NFTs in advance, and then sold them at high prices after promoting them on social media.
Lark Davis: 1.4 million followers. He frequently recommends low-market-cap projects to his followers and then quickly sells them, including tokens such as SHOPX, DOWS, and UMB.
Laurent Correia: A well-known French internet celebrity and reality show star, he managed the NFT project Billionaire Dogs Club, but his team ran away within a week of its launch.
The tragic collapse of ALT to zero within four hours is just an ordinary leek-cutting script in the Web3 world.
Projects can collapse, personalities can fall, but lessons must not be forgotten.
