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Lightning Sharks Exposed: The Secret BSV Marketing Machine

BSV with Lightning Sharks logo

BSV has been in turmoil for almost its entire existence. The Bitcoin Cash fork led by Faketoshi Craig Wright has been marketed by its participants as the real Bitcoin, and their efforts have only hurt BSV's future.

After seeing an r/BSV post by an insider detailing how Calvin Ayre appears to hire paid marketers from an international marketing agency called Lightning Sharks, I decided to investigate.

former BSV employee post about Lightning Sharks

The first clues of a BSV shill agency

Lightning Sharks, at first glance, appears to be a normal business operating in London with international branches. However, this front of a "normal marketing agency" began to fall apart fast. After locating the Lightning Sharks X account, a few glaring things began to stand out.

Lightning Sharks Twitter account

Right off the bat, they seem to have an extremely low follower count. This is odd for a marketing agency who should want to reach new customers in different industries. It makes sense only when you realize Lightning Sharks is trying to keep a low profile to distract from them only serving the BSV ecosystem.

Light Sharks followers
Sample of Lightning Sharks' followers
people Lightning Sharks follows
Sample of people Lightning Sharks follows

The small samples above show the dominance of BSV in their client base. Patrick Thompson and Patrick Prinz follow them; a top CoinGeek writer and the COO of nChain, respectively. Notably, their follower base and the people they follow are virtually the same.

Shifting focus to the Lightning Sharks website, it features many odd details you would not expect from a typical UK marketing agency.

 

Lightning shark BSV testimonials
Lightning shark BSV testimonials

Every company that gave a testimonial about Lightning Sharks is based in the BSV ecosystem. This page alone demonstrates that Lightning Sharks does a significant amount of marketing work for BSV.

"The Bitcoin Association" is the organization with full ownership over the BSV protocol. As such, they also control the BSV node software, which includes a new ability: declaring any blocks invalid:

"Since the inception of the Bitcoin Association, we have worked closely with Lightning Sharks on our branding, marketing and events campaigns, PR, video production and overall communications."

That statement shows how truly close the Bitcoin Association has been to Lightning Sharks since the start; they do a sizable portion of the Bitcoin Association's branding, marketing, event campaigns, PR, video production and... overall communications.

The workers behind the scheme likely didn't name it the "BSV Association" because "Bitcoin Association" is a term designed to mislead novice investors into thinking it is the organization behind Bitcoin. In reality, no such entity controls Bitcoin. They appear to be misleading investors by claiming their project is the real Bitcoin when it is a centralized Bitcoin Cash fork.

Rounding up the list, we have Ayre's mining firm, TAAL, which provides the majority of the BSV hash rate. Notice how the testimonial from TAAL stated:

"We worked closely with Lightning Sharks in the rebranding of our company."

But, this story goes far deeper than some testimonials and social media followers.

Potemkin village
A metaphorical representation of the BSV ecosystem: a Potemkin Village, source: www.ideatovalue.com

Calvin Ayre's PR agency

Calvin Ayre appears to fund a vast majority of the activities in the BSV ecosystem, as shown below with BSV conferences. As a result, BSV is a Potemkin village in reality versus the image of a bustling enterprise blockchain ecosystem that its leaders desperately want you to believe. Did you know that Lightning Sharks is also the PR agency for Ayre?

Online posts made by BSV companies, such as the Bitcoin Association and CoinGeek, show that you must contact a Lightning Sharks PR employee before you can formally reach higher level employees.

Lightning Sharks PR manager contact info

 

Lightning Sharks PR manager contact info

Trusting a single marketing agency for all your PR needs is a pretty big gamble, unless, of course, it's run by the same people you trust every day.

CoinGeek = Lightning Sharks

Lightning Sharks team
The Lightning Sharks team

Lightning Sharks posted some telling pictures on their Facebook account, but none on their website. What you find very quickly are some top CoinGeek employees, such as... Charles Miller, the documentary guy behind the CoinGeek interview series "CoinGeek Conversations," who you can see in the bottom left of the above Lightning Sharks team photo.

Lightning Sharks even has no qualms making X posts about one of their directors: CoinGeek reporter and producer Rebecca Liggero Fontana, otherwise known as "BSV Becky."

Lightning Sharks tweet about CoinGeek Reporter
CoinGeek reporter Rebecca Liggero Fontana's Twitter account

What this shows is that CoinGeek's production agency appears to be Lightning Sharks. This is further supported by an X post demonstrating that they are also behind CoinGeek conference events such as "Bitcade."

CoinGeek Bitcade event

In a vain attempt to maintain any neutrality, the Lightning Sharks social media manager put both BSV and Bitcoin as hashtags in the above tweet. This may fool your average BSVer, but it's obvious to anyone not involved in the project that Lightning Sharks only serves BSV.

Recently, Craig Wright appeared in a highly staged "Masterclass with Satoshi" where he made a failing attempt to teach aspiring BSV developers about the basics of the protocol. The reason for this is Craig Wright can't code. Lightning Sharks also was the producer of these events. This also appears to be the case for every other CoinGeek conference, as you can see.

Lightning Sharks retweeting tweet about BSV masterclass

Lightning Sharks tweeting about CoinGeek London Conference

New details

Bitcoin Journalist Arthur van Pelt discovered some interesting things about the inner workings of Lightning Sharks. There is another woman working at Lightning Sharks who is key to the operations of BSV: Natalie Mason. A close confidant of Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre, she is a BSV marketer and production specialist who will spearhead the future Faketoshi documentary.

You can see below how she is strong supporter of Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre. This, in my opinion, is because she appears to be a paid worker like many others. It's hard to imagine that even someone with her skills as a former BBC production specialist and Netflix worker can turn the Faketoshi disaster into a watchable flick.

Natalie Mason with Craig Wright

Also, there is proof that Ayre is behind Lightning Sharks:

page showing Calvin Ayre as owner of Lightning Sharks

An army of shills

The Bitcoin Association careers board has a wealth of information demonstrating Lightning Shark's nature as a recruiter of BSV marketers. It appears to be virtually effortless to become a BSV marketer hired by Lightning Sharks.

Lightning Sharks paid shill job listing
Lightning Sharks paid shill job listing

In the above job listing, one can observe that Lightning Sharks is hiring a paid "content marketing writer." Notice in the listed tasks that the hire would be responsible for "social media copy." Given that the Lightning Sharks X account is extremely bare, this job listing is likely for another purpose, which is marketing BSV on social media platforms.

In the last year, there has been a sizable jump in random, small X accounts spamming BSV marketing prompts. Combining this notion with the above job post and the original r/BSV post, can lead one to the conclusion of Lightning Sharks being the mysterious entity hiring these seemingly normal individuals.

They appear to be real people, who likely took it as a side job. Repeatedly spam the same BSV marketing prompts every day on social media? Doesn't sound like a difficult job.

It appers likely an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT is being utilized for these marketing prompts. This strategy would make it effortless to replicate across these random accounts. In addition, there is now evidence that the BSV Association has been exploring its own AI bot to market BSV.

Here is an example of a likely Lightning Shark. The most important part of this profile is that the Bitcoin Association follows it. For a 242 follower account, with seemingly no relation to BSV, this account is doing significant amount of BSV marketing. Notice how the person behind this account put "Social Media Influencer" as the professional category, since this will be important shortly.

BSV Lightning Shark Twitter account
Lightning Shark shilling BSV
Lightning Shark deflecting from BSV involvement

"Glenn" writes marketing posts for BSV as if he's been on the scene for years. He tried to claim he came from the BSV gaming scene, but there's no evidence of him doing anything related to BSV other than spamming marketing prompts about it on X.

The account is verified, so a real person is behind the account. You'll also notice since the publishing of this article, Glenn has removed the "Social Media Influencer" label; this is unsurprising given the evidence in this article showing that mistake.

In my opinion, the whole scheme is known as astroturfing, which X user @Bitnorbert wrote an excellent explanation in his own thread about Lightning Sharks. Essentially, accounts that do marketing work for an organization, such as the BSV Association, obfuscate their involvement and try to appear simply as fans. When you press them, they deny all involvement, like Glenn.

 

Some of them are even caught off guard. Another likely Lightning Shark deleted his/her X account after pressing them on their true nature. This is confirmation that the owner of this account acknowledged the existence of Lightning Sharks before account deletion. @Bitnorbert also discovered that this account used a stock profile picture.

Since the goal is to reach as many people as possible, X is of course not the only social media platform where Lightning sharks has likely shills deployed: Enter the Reddit version.

Lightning Shark Reddit account

Notice how this individual only posts in the official BSV cult subreddit, r/BitcoincashSV. There are certain shill accounts which post random things in between their posts in an attempt to obfuscate involvement, but "Galamayan" has no qualms spamming BSV propaganda all day long.

 

It appears the person behind this account made an original X account that has been shilling BSV propaganda since October 2022, and created another X account as a backup.

Most importantly, in the original account from "Dodong," he/she lists themselves as a "Social Media Influencer" in the exact same way "Glenn" did by utilizing X's professional categories selector. This revelation demonstrates a standardization across some Lightning Sharks accounts.

Humorously, someone must have thought this category selection present in multiple shill accounts would not appear suspect, when it logically indicates the complete opposite.

Upon further investigation, this has also been done for Glenn as well; enter: his second account.

Glenn Lightning Shark second Twitter account

Lightning Sharks has so many possible shills, that BSV analyst Peter Scott-Morgan made a spreadsheet tracking the various accounts, totaling over 60.

Conclusion

Lightning Sharks is a marketing agency functioning as both the marketing and PR team for the Bitcoin Association, CoinGeek, and other BSV organizations. Their marketing strategy appears to involve social media copywriting to achieve a goal of mass BitCoinization (BSVers refer to BSV as BitCoin often).

Luckily, the random accounts likely controlled by Lightning Sharks are easy to detect, leaving knowledgeable people not to fall for it. Lightning Sharks highlights the true hilarity and desperation of BSV in its final days.

 

*Updated with new contributions from Bitcoin journalist Arthur van Pelt

 

Article Disclaimer: The information in this article is based on research and represents the author's opinion, not established fact. Readers should evaluate independently.