Shell (2025) is a typical case of a market maker-led blanket-style harvesting of retail investors, where the core operation revolves around a three-step logic of 'controlling the market price - enticing entry - concentrated selling', ultimately achieving a cash-out of 20 million USD, while causing the coin price to plummet, resulting in heavy losses for retail investors.
In the early stages of the project, market makers controlled the market by holding a large amount of chips and used methods such as community hype and the release of false good news to gradually raise Shell's market price, creating a false prosperity of 'value appreciation' for the cryptocurrency. As the coin price continued to rise, a large number of retail investors were attracted by the profit effect, rushing in to take over, leading to peak market trading heat and position volume.
After the proportion of retail investors' positions reached expectations, market makers chose to sell off their chips at a concentrated loss, causing enormous selling pressure to break through market liquidity in a short time, triggering a sharp decline in the coin price, with the price halving in a very short period. At this time, retail investors found it difficult to sell their holdings due to insufficient market depth and could only passively bear the consequences of significant asset depreciation.
Throughout the operation, market makers leveraged their information advantage and market control ability, treating retail investors as tools for taking over, completely ignoring the value support of the project itself, which is a typical epitome of blanket-style harvesting in the cryptocurrency circle.