Since the birth of Bitcoin, the blockchain industry has branched into several paths during the Web3 wave: the crypto world relies on consensus hype, the chain community focuses on genuine technology, and the trading circle is purely scammers showing off.

It sounds all like blockchain, but in reality, their logic, goals, and gameplay are completely different. Many people still don’t understand these differences and have suffered quite a few losses. Today, let’s break it down—especially the tricks in the trading circle that you need to recognize.

**The trading circle is just a rat poison disguised as blockchain**

In simple terms, the trading circle is a hybrid of Ponzi schemes and pyramid selling, packaged as illegal ecosystems using hot words like DeFi and metaverse. The operators’ only goal is to make money.

The operation model is very套路: top-level operators control the scheme, middle-level agents recruit people, and retail investors keep pouring money in. It's a typical pyramid structure, and the last ones to lose are always the chives.

**Three common tricks in trading circle projects**

These types of projects share a characteristic: no real technology, no practical application, just pure money games. Common forms include:

Virtual currency mutual aid schemes often call themselves "DeFi financial management" or "liquidity mining," promising daily interest rates of 1%-3%, along with "static收益+referral rewards." The former "3M mutual aid finance" is a typical example, which didn’t deploy any smart contracts at all and relied solely on WeChat groups to bring in people and maintain cash flow. When it collapsed, it involved millions of investors worldwide.

NFT pyramid schemes package themselves as "NFT blind box mutual aid" or "digital art splitting investment," sounding high-end, but in fact are just new disguises for digital scams.

Although these three forms have different packaging, their essence is the same—they have no assets, no technology, no ecosystem, and rely solely on a continuous influx of new funds to keep the scheme running. As soon as new investors decrease, the entire system collapses instantly.