Nvidia engineers are suspected of $ 8 million AI tokens fraud, and the crisis of trust in the encryption industry broke out

Author: dorian

"This is the darkest 6 days in my life." The voice of the single mother Violet was still shaking. The 400,000 education fund prepared for her daughter had less than 30,000 left after the collapse of trust -this AI scam with Nvidia technology halo as bait is subverting the foundation of trust in the encrypted world.

 Start and end

The perfect hunting of the technical butcher

On January 24, 2025, a tweet ignited the encrypted community. Travis Cline (@Traviscline), a Nvidia core engineer, released tokens named TMC CORP (TMC)

His resume is perfect: LinkedIn shows that he is not only a core member of Nvidia AI team, but also the founding engineer of Brev.Dev acquired; Github accounts get 5500 star marks, and the open source project Langchaingo is regarded as Gui. Thousands of investors quickly poured in, so that the market value of TMC quickly reached more than $ 20 million. But Travis quickly deleted this tweet soon, causing TMC prices to plummet in a short time.

But soon after Travis announced at a high profile: "TMC -a revolutionary experiment of a crowdfunding Kaishang AI tool." Everyone realized that this is not a Meme Coin, but a fundraising of the public issued by the Nvidia core team members. Open source AI tool project. At the same time, encrypted Kol @okrenaissance verified with Travis himself through private domain channels, and confirmed that the tokens were issued by him. When everyone knows that TMC was released by Travis himself, TMC was snapped up crazy in the market, and the market value rushed to more than $ 30 million.

As everyone thinks that they have invested in a promising AI project, unexpected changes have taken place. Several very early purchase addresses began to smash the disk crazy, and many very early purchase addresses began to be sold in large quantities. According to incomplete statistics, the profit was over 3 million US dollars. "This is not a mistake, it is a well -designed harvest." Detective @melardev on the chain found that these operations were likely to be premeditated. At the same time, many victims also bought TMC counterfeit currency, because hackers issued TMC counterfeit coins to Travis's wallet, Travis immediately smashed all TMC counterfeit currency and only used a small amount of SOL to repurchase TMC reality coins. All the remaining victims were deceived to withdraw His Sol recharges to the centralized exchange and entered his own pocket.

 Detective tracking of the chain

After that, dozens of investors have tried all kinds of channels to receive any reply from Travis. When investors poured into Discord questions, Travis rudely removed these people from the channel, deleted all their messages, leaving a sentence "Regrets and encrypted people" and disappeared from now on.

 After the incident is completed, Enron escapes Enron

At this point, the price of TMC has fallen by more than 94%, almost zero.

" Nvidia's signboard is more than any white paper"

After losing contact, Travis even recently disclosed that he had left the project in a taunt tone. Investors who left a chicken feathers paid for his harvest.

Klose is a college student who has just graduated. He only participated in the work for less than a year. He invested in TMC the money made by working because he believed that this was a crowdfunding project released by a real -name developer of Nvidia. There will be actual reality behind it. product. He purchased $ 11,000 of TMC token one after another, and even lost more than 90%as of today. He told us that he didn't even know how to pay the next quarter rent.

Violet is a sales of a traditional industry and a mother of a 3 -year -old daughter. Because she saw Travis's Linkedin resume and his company was Nvidia, she felt that he would continue to support and develop his crowdfunding project, so she first learned and purchased TMC on the Solana chain. Within 6 days, she lost more than $ 50,000 on the TMC token. This was her all -year -old salary plus sales commission. She can only rely on drugs to fall asleep normally.

Roger is one of the largest individual investors in the TMC project and the biggest loss. Quoting Roger's words, he has had a lot of investment in the first and secondary markets. He failed to fail after the project tried to try. This is the risk of innovation. But innovation and fraud are two different things. Tens of thousands of people choose to support you with real gold and silver. You delete their news, kick them out of the community, refuse communication, and profit by selling tokens. This is naked fraud.

 Direct statement: I\'m out of the situation

Roger said that if he and other TMC Holders' reasonable demands still fail to respond, he will go to the Nvidia Santa Clara headquarters to protest the parade with other TMC Holders in the Bay Area, and prepare to join for investors to contact the lawyer with many $ TMC investors. Collective lawsuit to Travis.

**The crossroads of the encryption industry: from "Meme Carnival" to

value reconstruction**

The incident coincided with the key transformation period of the encryption industry: Meme Coin's speculative enthusiasm has not yet receded, but a number of value projects represented by AI, DEPIN, and chain are trying to reshape the industry logic. Travis Cline's scam just hit the vulnerability of this transition period.

Meme Coin's "Mingpai Game": Meme projects such as dog currency and PEPE never concealed their entertainment attributes, and investors know that they are participating in a high -risk speculative game. The scams of Travis Cline are essentially a betrayal of the AI ​​open source community. He used his technical reputation on GitHub (Langchaingo, a 5500 star label, open source project LANGCHAINGO) to pack the scam as "crowdfunding open source AI tool". The harmfulness of this behavior is far more than that of ordinary Meme speculation because it destroys the most scarce resources in the encryption industry -trust in technical innovators.

The open source project should be a symbol of technological democratization, but this incident exposes a cruel reality: the halo of the technical elite may become a cover of fraud. If similar incidents are frequent, investors will gradually be alert to innovative projects of "developers' autonomous driving", resulting in really valuable grassroots projects that are difficult to obtain financial support.

At present, the "survival and defense war" of value projects, many teams explore real value through the direction of "AI model training" and "decentralized computing power market". If the scams are spreading, these efforts may be labeled "scam".

The encryption industry is in the transition period from "casino" to "toolbox". Only by resolutely resisting technological fraud and supporting real innovation can the industry get out of bubbles and win the recognition of mainstream society.

**The technology is good, and the bottom line of the entire industry

needs to be guarded**

The Travis Cline incident is a mirror that reflects the challenges faced by technology giants, open source communities and the encryption industry: When technical authority is abused, the ideal of innovation ideals will be defiled, the foundation of the entire ecology will shake. We call:

· Nvidia: Taking this incident as an abstinence, the employee 's moral review is incorporated into the technical ability assessment system;

· AI developer: reconstruct the society 's trust in open source innovation with transparent action;

· The encrypted industry: Constructing "anti -fraud firewalls" and providing survival soil for value projects.

Only in this way can technology truly become a flame that promotes human progress, not the wildfire that is burned.