Zeus Capital is reportedly offering prominent members of Crypto Twitter payment to spread unfavourable news about Chainlink, which hit a new record high price recently.

Zeus Capital came to prominence recently after releasing a report claiming LINK was a scam and then heavily promoting negative news about Chainlink via Twitter ads. It has since called upon users to join a class-action lawsuit against CEO Sergey Nazarov.

According to a screenshot posted to Twitter by ‘The Wolf of All Streets’ Scott Melker on July 29, Zeus Capital reached out to him asking them if he’d be willing to post an analysis of Chainlink (LINK) to social media “for a fee.”

Twitter direct message from Zeus Capital. Source: Scott Melker

Melker, who has more than 108,000 followers, was not the only influencer to report the offer. Josh Rager said he’d simply ignored the firm’s messages. Crypto Twitter user Smokey posted a screenshot of an identical message to his 17,500 followers. 

The “fee” to which Zeus is referring was left ambiguous by users who didn’t take up the firm on its offer. Zeus Capital CEO David Baumann spoke to Cointelegraph, saying the size of the fee was determined primarily by the influencers. According to him, the offer was “nothing unusual” and the firm was not specifically asking for a bearish assessment of LINK.

But one user, icebergy, who has more than 12K followers, reached out to Zeus with an offer to post a “bad LINK chart” for 5 Bitcoin (BTC) — roughly $55,000 at the time of writing. A different account — using “i” instead of ‘L” for the last letter of “capital” — claiming to represent Zeus Capital later inquired if the offer was still valid. Baumann denied the account belonged to the firm, saying it was a fake.

Crypto Bitlord has also posted updates about LINK — although this may well be a joke.

Backfire effect

While Zeus is pushing influencers to potentially disparage LINK, it’s possible that such seedy tactics may be having the opposite effect. Melker referred to the incident as “completely absurd” and bad for the cryptospace. Others like Obit7777777 called Zeus’ actions desperate: “They want you to analyse one of the cleanest charts in crypto hoping to find something bearish.”  

A few, including AlCryptoTrader, even said they were willing to buy LINK at $8-9 just to “f--- over Zeus Capital.”

Why spread negative news?

Zeus authored a report recently claiming it was building a Chainlink short position with a target of 99% gains. However, its website appears to have been registered only seven months ago, and the firm’s Twitter account has been suspended for violations of the platform's terms of use multiple times.

On July 27, it called upon its 3,800 Twitter followers to join a class-action lawsuit against LINK over the alleged pump and dump manipulation in 2019.

Despite Melker’s free analysis on July 28 that LINK is decidedly “not bullish,” the token was still priced at $7.17 at the time of writing, having risen 56.3% in the last month.