Last night, $KTA, the "pumper" on the Base chain, plummeted, and as of the time of writing, it had fallen by 20% in 24 hours. The trigger for the plunge was a tweet.
Community user MRG (@thespacecatjr) said that after experiencing the Keeta testnet, he thought the project was completely fake. "The block browser is a fake page built with Vercel, and the transaction data displayed on it is fake. The Swap function is completely unusable. The white paper is garbage put together by AI, and the documentation is the same. I'm not even bothered to try their SDK."
What made $KTA plunge even more violent was the reply from the on-chain detective ZachXBT, "When the people who promote a project the most are not the actual developers, but some unknown KOLs (such as Nekoz), it usually means that the technology of the project is not that good. The L1 chain of a so-called "serious" project issued coins before releasing a product, charged high taxes and fees when it went online, and was eventually hyped up to a sky-high valuation - this kind of thing is always outrageous and funny."
Additionally, Zach said Keeta’s control over token supply appears to be strong.
After public opinion fermented, Keeta's official account stated that it would conduct a full live test on June 12, and cooperate with the Google Spanner engineering team to verify Keeta's ability to process 10 million transactions per second.
Google's former CEO and Keeta's investment history
Players familiar with the Base ecosystem must have heard about Keeta recently. Not only has it experienced a terrifying increase of more than 600 times since its launch, its fully circulated market value exceeds US$1.6 billion, but more importantly, it has received US$17 million in funding support from investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Steel Perlot Management, an incubator platform he founded.
Eric Schmidt is one of the most influential technology giants in Silicon Valley. He has served as CEO of Google since 2001 and has led the company's strategic transformation from search engines to Android, maps, Gmail, cloud computing and other key product lines, and witnessed the rise of its parent company Alphabet. After leaving office, he gradually shifted his focus from corporate management to scientific research, diplomacy and early technology investment, and was particularly keen on the layout of artificial intelligence, network security and military technology.
Keeta first announced the completion of a $17 million financing through the American news media PR Newswire on June 6, 2023. The press release clearly stated: "Keeta is a new global payment platform that provides instant and secure cross-border currency transactions. It was officially launched today and has received support from investors including Eric Schmidt and Steel Perlot Management, LLC." As a result, Schmidt's name has become one of the most important words in the $KTA community communication.
Spend money to win the heart of a beauty
Eric Schmidt's Steel Perlot was once regarded as one of Schmidt's most publicly invested entrepreneurial platforms after his retirement from Google. Michelle Ritter, the founder and CEO of Steel Perlot, is also his extramarital girlfriend. The two met in 2020 when Ritter was a junior at Columbia Law School. Soon, with the funding, connections and influence provided by Schmidt, Ritter founded Steel Perlot, claiming that it would incubate the next generation of companies in the field of "AI + blockchain + payment".
Ritter, who graduated from Columbia Law School in 2021, worked as a cybersecurity research assistant at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and also interned at the law firm Skadden. She said she met Schmidt through law school connections. According to the New York Post that year, they began dating when they attended the Virgin Galactic rocket launch ceremony together, and soon after they held a party at the luxury New York club Zero Bond to officially launch Steel Perlot.
In the years when love and business were intertwined, Schmidt not only provided Steel Perlot with approximately $140 million in funding, but also brought Ritter into his social and investment circles, including attending events with OpenAI's Sam Altman, Scale AI's Alexandr Wang and others, and even arranged for Ritter's parents to live next to his mansion in Bel Air.
According to The Information, Ritter and Schmidt began discussing big ideas about business strategy after they met in 2020. Eventually, Ritter proposed her vision for Steel Perlot - a new type of hedge fund that uses advanced trading strategies while incubating startups involved in payments, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the maker economy.
Steel Perlot regularly received funding from Hillspire, a large Silicon Valley family office that was the core entity for Schmidt to manage his private wealth, providing financial support for multiple projects. Even when Steel Perlot could not afford the company's operating expenses, Hillspire directly assumed $2.5 million in salary and credit card debt.
Internal documents show that as of the end of 2022, Steel Perlot had about 90 employees, with annual salary expenses of $16 million and an average annual salary of more than $300,000 for its employees. Steel Perlot's other expenses are also increasing. According to financial records, the startup rents offices near SoHo in New York and in Los Angeles, spending more than $160,000 a month.
Under Ritter’s leadership, Steel Perlot lavished high salaries on employees while bringing in little revenue. Internal documents show that some startups incubated by Steel Perlot, such as a company that developed tools for social media creators, closed shortly after their founding. Former employees said Ritter often told employees that she had raised large sums of money from new investors, but those investors never showed up.
Good times don’t last long
The affair did not last long, and cracks began to appear in the relationship between Schmidt and Ritter in the second half of 2023. Around mid-2022, Ritter accused Schmidt of sleeping with other women and traveling, and she became increasingly frustrated that Schmidt was still married to Wendy Schmidt.
During a 2022 staff trip to France, Ritter argued with Schmidt because he had not invited her to a meeting with people in his network, one former employee said. She was also angry that a news article about Steel Perlot’s startup, Keeta, named Schmidt as an investor but not her company.
In early 2024, Ritter and other executives approached Schmidt’s Hillspire for additional funding to help fund operations, but only if the startup hit business milestones and raised outside capital. Hillspire declined, citing lagging business progress.
As the media reported on Schmidt's interactions with his wife in various social settings, rumors circulated that Schmidt had stopped further funding for Steel Perlot and that the company's operations were in trouble.
In an internal letter to Steel Perlot employees, Ritter accused Schmidt of not fulfilling his promise to continue supporting the company and attributed the company's difficulties to the interruption of personal emotions. People around Schmidt revealed that Ritter exaggerated the financing progress and exaggerated the packaging of projects in order to gain more support, which eventually made him decide to withdraw.
Keeta becomes a hollow disk? What is the current situation of other companies invested by Steel Perlot?
Currently, the author has not found any relevant statements about Schmidt and Steel Perlot’s investments in Keeta’s official Twitter account “@KeetaNetwork”.
Someone in the community commented on Keeta, saying, "After listening to the team's presentation on Spaces on the first day and spending a few hours researching, it was obvious that the project Schmidt invested in was actually something completely different a few years ago."
According to statistics from community member @adaYen 72 , the time when $KTA is pulled is mostly during the weekend when liquidity is poor, which means that the cost of pulling is low, and currently $KTA has not yet been listed on any mainstream trading platform with good liquidity.
When the author was collecting public opinion information about Keeta, he found that some links questioning the Keeta project had been deleted, including problems with the token economic model, the exchange trading model, obvious signs of price manipulation, and the claim that Eric Schmidt was a consultant.
As mentioned earlier, in addition to Keeta, Steel Perlot’s investment projects also include decentralized dark pool trading protocol Tristero, Web3 privacy infrastructure Socket, instant messaging tool Zo, creator economy platform Hachi, AI company Pryon, decentralized banking platform Knox Networks and more than a dozen other startups.
There is no doubt that with the break of Steel Perlot’s capital chain, the above investment projects are no longer in operation, including Michelle Ritter and Steel Perlot’s official social X accounts, the latest posting date of which is May 2024.
Keeta was launched on Base without any warning in March this year, and was even mistakenly believed to have been stolen from the official project. With three months of price manipulation, the market did not seem to care whether Keeta was really endorsed by the former CEO of Google.
Currently, the price of $KTA is still at an extremely high valuation stage, and the community's doubts about its token liquidity control, KOL's manipulation traces and its behind-the-scenes team continue to ferment. Once the so-called 10 million TPS test fails to be completed as scheduled or as expected, the Keeta project will face a more serious crisis of trust.
