Last night, the "handsome lad" $KTA on the Base chain plummeted, with a 24-hour drop of 20% as of the time of writing. The trigger for the crash was a tweet.
Community user MRG (@thespacecatjr) stated that after experiencing the Keeta testnet, he believes the project is completely fake, "The block explorer is a fake page built with Vercel, and the transaction data displayed on it is fabricated. The Swap function cannot be used at all. The white paper is garbage pieced together by AI, and the documentation is the same. I'm even too lazy to try their SDK."
What exacerbated the plunge of $KTA was the reply from on-chain detective ZachXBT, "When the most vigorous promoters of a project are not the actual developers, but some unknown KOLs (like Nekoz), it usually means that the technology of this project is not that great. It is always absurd and quite funny for a so-called 'serious' project's L1 chain to issue tokens before launching a product and charging high taxes after going live, ultimately being inflated to sky-high valuations."
In addition, Zach also mentioned that Keeta's control over the token supply looks quite impressive.
After the public opinion has fermented, the official account of Keeta stated that a full live test will be conducted on June 12, in collaboration with the Google Spanner engineering team, to verify Keeta's ability to process 10 million transactions per second.
The investment history of Google's former CEO and Keeta
Players familiar with the Base ecosystem must have frequently heard about Keeta recently, not only because of its terrifying increase of over 600 times since launch and its fully diluted market capitalization exceeding 1.6 billion dollars, but more importantly, it has received $17 million in funding support from investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the incubator platform Steel Perlot Management he founded.
Eric Schmidt is one of the most influential tech giants in Silicon Valley, having served as CEO of Google since 2001, leading the company's strategic transformation from a search engine to multiple key product lines, including Android, Maps, Gmail, and cloud computing, and witnessing the rise of its parent company, Alphabet. After stepping down, he gradually shifted his focus from corporate management to research, diplomacy, and early-stage tech investments, particularly passionate about the landscape of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and military technology.
Keeta announced the completion of a $17 million financing on June 6, 2023, through the American news media PR Newswire. The press release clearly stated: "Keeta is a new global payment platform that offers instant and secure cross-border currency transactions, and today officially launches with the support of investors including Eric Schmidt and Steel Perlot Management, LLC." Thus, Schmidt's name became one of the most significant talking points in the $KTA community communication.
Burning money to win a beauty's heart
Eric Schmidt's Steel Perlot was once seen as one of Schmidt's most publicly invested startup platforms since retiring from Google. Michelle Ritter, the founder and CEO of Steel Perlot, is also his extramarital girlfriend. The two met in 2020 when Ritter was a junior at Columbia Law School. Soon, with Schmidt's funding, connections, and influence, Ritter founded Steel Perlot, claiming to incubate the next generation of companies in the "AI + Blockchain + Payments" space.
Ritter, who graduated from Columbia Law School in 2021, previously served as a cybersecurity research assistant at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and interned at the law firm Skadden. She stated that she met Schmidt through connections made at law school. According to a report from the New York Post at the time, they began dating after attending the Virgin Galactic rocket launch ceremony together, and shortly thereafter, they held a party at the luxurious New York club Zero Bond to officially launch Steel Perlot.
During the years when emotions and business intertwined, Schmidt not only provided approximately $140 million in funding to Steel Perlot, but also included Ritter in his social and investment circles, attending events alongside people like Sam Altman from OpenAI and Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, and even arranged for Ritter's parents to live next to his mansion in Bel Air.
According to a report by The Information, Ritter and Schmidt met in 2020 and began discussing big ideas related to business strategy. Ultimately, Ritter presented her vision for Steel Perlot—a new type of hedge fund that uses advanced trading strategies while incubating startups involved in payments, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the maker economy.
Steel Perlot regularly receives funding from Hillspire, a large Silicon Valley family office that is the core entity managing Schmidt's private wealth and provides funding support for multiple projects. Even when Steel Perlot could not afford the operating expenses of the company, Hillspire directly assumed $2.5 million in salaries and credit card debt.
Internal documents show that by the end of 2022, Steel Perlot had approximately 90 employees, with annual payroll expenses reaching 16 million USD, and the average annual salary of employees exceeding 300,000 USD. Other expenses for Steel Perlot are also continuously increasing; according to financial records, this startup rents offices near SoHo in New York and in Los Angeles, spending over 160,000 USD per month.
Under Ritter's leadership, Steel Perlot Company has extravagantly squandered employees' high salaries, yet only brought in meager revenues. Internal documents show that some startups incubated by Steel Perlot, such as a company developing tools for social media creators, shut down shortly after being established. Former employees stated that Ritter often told them she had raised a large amount of money from new investors, but these investors never materialized.
Good times do not last long.
This romantic relationship did not last long; in the second half of 2023, cracks began to appear in the romantic relationship between Schmidt and Ritter. Around mid-2022, Ritter accused Schmidt of sleeping with and traveling with other women, and she became increasingly frustrated that Schmidt was still married to Wendy Schmidt.
A former employee said that during a company trip to France in 2022, Ritter argued with Schmidt because Schmidt did not invite her to a meeting with people in his network. She was also angry that a news report introducing the startup Keeta mentioned Schmidt as an investor but did not mention her company.
At the beginning of 2024, Ritter and other executives sought additional funding from Schmidt's Hillspire company to finance the company's operations, but on the condition that the startup must achieve business milestones and raise external funds. Hillspire rejected this on the grounds of slow business progress.
As media reports on Schmidt's interactions with his wife in different social occasions circulate, there are rumors that Schmidt has suspended further funding for Steel Perlot, leading the company's operations into difficulties.
In an internal letter from Steel Perlot's employees, Ritter accused Schmidt of failing to fulfill his commitment to continue support, blaming the company's difficulties on the disruption of personal feelings. However, sources close to Schmidt revealed that Ritter exaggerated the financing progress and inflated project packaging in his operations to gain more support, ultimately leading to his decision to withdraw.
Is Keeta becoming an air disk? What is the current status of other companies invested by Steel Perlot?
Currently, in the official Keeta Twitter account "@KeetaNetwork", the author has not found any statements related to the investments by Schmidt and Steel Perlot.
Some community members commented on Keeta, saying, "After listening to the team's speech on Spaces and spending a few hours researching it on the first day, it has become very clear - the project that Schmidt invested in was actually something completely different from a few years ago."
According to community member @adaYen72, the pump time for $KTA is mainly during weekends when liquidity is lower, which means the pumping cost is low, and currently, $KTA has not been listed on any mainstream trading platforms with better liquidity.
When the author was collecting public opinion data on Keeta, they found that links questioning the Keeta project had all been deleted, including issues related to the token economic model, exchange manipulation patterns, obvious signs of price manipulation, and claims that Eric Schmidt is an advisor.
As mentioned earlier, in addition to Keeta, Steel Perlot's investment projects include over ten startups such as the decentralized dark pool trading protocol Tristero, the Web3 privacy infrastructure Socket, the instant messaging tool Zo, the creator economy platform Hachi, the AI company Pryon, and the decentralized banking platform Knox Networks.
There is no doubt that with the funding chain of Steel Perlot broken, the investment projects above are no longer operational, including the official social X account of Michelle Ritter and Steel Perlot, with the most recent post date remaining in May 2024.
Keeta unexpectedly launched on Base in March this year, initially even being mistaken for a hacked official project Twitter account. With three months of pump time, the market seems indifferent to whether Keeta is truly endorsed by Google's former CEO.
Currently, the price of $KTA is still at a highly overvalued stage, and the community's doubts about its token liquidity control, KOL manipulation traces, and the background team's credibility continue to brew. If the so-called 10 million TPS test fails to be completed on time or truthfully, the Keeta project will face a more serious trust crisis.
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The KTA conspiracy group has been exposed, revealing the extramarital affair history of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Written by: shushu
Last night, the "handsome lad" $KTA on the Base chain plummeted, with a 24-hour drop of 20% as of the time of writing. The trigger for the crash was a tweet.
Community user MRG (@thespacecatjr) stated that after experiencing the Keeta testnet, he believes the project is completely fake, "The block explorer is a fake page built with Vercel, and the transaction data displayed on it is fabricated. The Swap function cannot be used at all. The white paper is garbage pieced together by AI, and the documentation is the same. I'm even too lazy to try their SDK."
What exacerbated the plunge of $KTA was the reply from on-chain detective ZachXBT, "When the most vigorous promoters of a project are not the actual developers, but some unknown KOLs (like Nekoz), it usually means that the technology of this project is not that great. It is always absurd and quite funny for a so-called 'serious' project's L1 chain to issue tokens before launching a product and charging high taxes after going live, ultimately being inflated to sky-high valuations."
In addition, Zach also mentioned that Keeta's control over the token supply looks quite impressive.
After the public opinion has fermented, the official account of Keeta stated that a full live test will be conducted on June 12, in collaboration with the Google Spanner engineering team, to verify Keeta's ability to process 10 million transactions per second.
The investment history of Google's former CEO and Keeta
Players familiar with the Base ecosystem must have frequently heard about Keeta recently, not only because of its terrifying increase of over 600 times since launch and its fully diluted market capitalization exceeding 1.6 billion dollars, but more importantly, it has received $17 million in funding support from investors including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the incubator platform Steel Perlot Management he founded.
Eric Schmidt is one of the most influential tech giants in Silicon Valley, having served as CEO of Google since 2001, leading the company's strategic transformation from a search engine to multiple key product lines, including Android, Maps, Gmail, and cloud computing, and witnessing the rise of its parent company, Alphabet. After stepping down, he gradually shifted his focus from corporate management to research, diplomacy, and early-stage tech investments, particularly passionate about the landscape of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and military technology.
Keeta announced the completion of a $17 million financing on June 6, 2023, through the American news media PR Newswire. The press release clearly stated: "Keeta is a new global payment platform that offers instant and secure cross-border currency transactions, and today officially launches with the support of investors including Eric Schmidt and Steel Perlot Management, LLC." Thus, Schmidt's name became one of the most significant talking points in the $KTA community communication.
Burning money to win a beauty's heart
Eric Schmidt's Steel Perlot was once seen as one of Schmidt's most publicly invested startup platforms since retiring from Google. Michelle Ritter, the founder and CEO of Steel Perlot, is also his extramarital girlfriend. The two met in 2020 when Ritter was a junior at Columbia Law School. Soon, with Schmidt's funding, connections, and influence, Ritter founded Steel Perlot, claiming to incubate the next generation of companies in the "AI + Blockchain + Payments" space.
Ritter, who graduated from Columbia Law School in 2021, previously served as a cybersecurity research assistant at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and interned at the law firm Skadden. She stated that she met Schmidt through connections made at law school. According to a report from the New York Post at the time, they began dating after attending the Virgin Galactic rocket launch ceremony together, and shortly thereafter, they held a party at the luxurious New York club Zero Bond to officially launch Steel Perlot.
During the years when emotions and business intertwined, Schmidt not only provided approximately $140 million in funding to Steel Perlot, but also included Ritter in his social and investment circles, attending events alongside people like Sam Altman from OpenAI and Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, and even arranged for Ritter's parents to live next to his mansion in Bel Air.
According to a report by The Information, Ritter and Schmidt met in 2020 and began discussing big ideas related to business strategy. Ultimately, Ritter presented her vision for Steel Perlot—a new type of hedge fund that uses advanced trading strategies while incubating startups involved in payments, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the maker economy.
Steel Perlot regularly receives funding from Hillspire, a large Silicon Valley family office that is the core entity managing Schmidt's private wealth and provides funding support for multiple projects. Even when Steel Perlot could not afford the operating expenses of the company, Hillspire directly assumed $2.5 million in salaries and credit card debt.
Internal documents show that by the end of 2022, Steel Perlot had approximately 90 employees, with annual payroll expenses reaching 16 million USD, and the average annual salary of employees exceeding 300,000 USD. Other expenses for Steel Perlot are also continuously increasing; according to financial records, this startup rents offices near SoHo in New York and in Los Angeles, spending over 160,000 USD per month.
Under Ritter's leadership, Steel Perlot Company has extravagantly squandered employees' high salaries, yet only brought in meager revenues. Internal documents show that some startups incubated by Steel Perlot, such as a company developing tools for social media creators, shut down shortly after being established. Former employees stated that Ritter often told them she had raised a large amount of money from new investors, but these investors never materialized.
Good times do not last long.
This romantic relationship did not last long; in the second half of 2023, cracks began to appear in the romantic relationship between Schmidt and Ritter. Around mid-2022, Ritter accused Schmidt of sleeping with and traveling with other women, and she became increasingly frustrated that Schmidt was still married to Wendy Schmidt.
A former employee said that during a company trip to France in 2022, Ritter argued with Schmidt because Schmidt did not invite her to a meeting with people in his network. She was also angry that a news report introducing the startup Keeta mentioned Schmidt as an investor but did not mention her company.
At the beginning of 2024, Ritter and other executives sought additional funding from Schmidt's Hillspire company to finance the company's operations, but on the condition that the startup must achieve business milestones and raise external funds. Hillspire rejected this on the grounds of slow business progress.
As media reports on Schmidt's interactions with his wife in different social occasions circulate, there are rumors that Schmidt has suspended further funding for Steel Perlot, leading the company's operations into difficulties.
In an internal letter from Steel Perlot's employees, Ritter accused Schmidt of failing to fulfill his commitment to continue support, blaming the company's difficulties on the disruption of personal feelings. However, sources close to Schmidt revealed that Ritter exaggerated the financing progress and inflated project packaging in his operations to gain more support, ultimately leading to his decision to withdraw.
Is Keeta becoming an air disk? What is the current status of other companies invested by Steel Perlot?
Currently, in the official Keeta Twitter account "@KeetaNetwork", the author has not found any statements related to the investments by Schmidt and Steel Perlot.
Some community members commented on Keeta, saying, "After listening to the team's speech on Spaces and spending a few hours researching it on the first day, it has become very clear - the project that Schmidt invested in was actually something completely different from a few years ago."
According to community member @adaYen72, the pump time for $KTA is mainly during weekends when liquidity is lower, which means the pumping cost is low, and currently, $KTA has not been listed on any mainstream trading platforms with better liquidity.
When the author was collecting public opinion data on Keeta, they found that links questioning the Keeta project had all been deleted, including issues related to the token economic model, exchange manipulation patterns, obvious signs of price manipulation, and claims that Eric Schmidt is an advisor.
As mentioned earlier, in addition to Keeta, Steel Perlot's investment projects include over ten startups such as the decentralized dark pool trading protocol Tristero, the Web3 privacy infrastructure Socket, the instant messaging tool Zo, the creator economy platform Hachi, the AI company Pryon, and the decentralized banking platform Knox Networks.
There is no doubt that with the funding chain of Steel Perlot broken, the investment projects above are no longer operational, including the official social X account of Michelle Ritter and Steel Perlot, with the most recent post date remaining in May 2024.
Keeta unexpectedly launched on Base in March this year, initially even being mistaken for a hacked official project Twitter account. With three months of pump time, the market seems indifferent to whether Keeta is truly endorsed by Google's former CEO.
Currently, the price of $KTA is still at a highly overvalued stage, and the community's doubts about its token liquidity control, KOL manipulation traces, and the background team's credibility continue to brew. If the so-called 10 million TPS test fails to be completed on time or truthfully, the Keeta project will face a more serious trust crisis.