About this desk

What this desk is for

Pump Bot Primer exists because one phrase is doing four jobs and people are losing money in the gap. Somebody meets the words in a chat group, cannot tell whether they describe a piece of software a company sells or an arrangement between strangers, and makes a decision on the basis of that confusion. This site writes the meanings down separately so that the decision can be made on the basis of something else.

The audience is the person who has just met the phrase. Not developers, not traders, not people who already know which category they are in. That focus decides a great deal about how the pages are written: every term is defined where it first appears, the arithmetic is spelled out rather than referenced, and no sentence assumes the reader already agrees with the conclusion.

Who writes it

Pages are published by the Pump Bot Primer Desk, which is the editorial name for the people who produce this site. There is no invented author, no photograph, no biography and no credential claim, because inventing any of those would be the same kind of behaviour the site spends its time describing.

What that costs us is the authority a named expert would carry. What it buys is that nothing on the site depends on you believing a claim about a person you cannot verify. The arguments here are meant to work on their own, and where they rest on something external we point at the external thing directly.

How pages are researched

Three sources, in order of preference.

First, public protocol documentation. How transactions work, how a pool prices a swap, what a keypair is: all of this is documented publicly and can be read by anybody, so we describe it and link to the documentation rather than paraphrasing it into something vaguer.

Second, the public transaction record. Anything that happens on a public chain leaves data that anyone can inspect. Where a page makes a claim about what is visible on chain, that claim is written so that a reader can go and check it, and we say plainly what the record cannot show, which is usually intent.

Third, published material from financial regulators. Their investor alerts and customer advisories describe the mechanisms discussed here in language written before the current vocabulary existed, which makes them unusually useful. We link to the general material rather than to individual enforcement actions, because enforcement actions concern named parties and this site does not name anybody.

What this desk will not publish

These are refusals rather than aspirations, and they are worth stating in public so that they can be checked against the pages.

• Nothing that helps somebody run a scheme. No group structures, no timing, no sequencing, no recruitment or coordination detail. The page on how coordinated buying works explains the mechanism to the depth a potential victim needs in order to recognise it, and stops there. This makes that page less complete than it could be, deliberately.
• No invented numbers. There are no statistics on this site about how often these schemes happen or how much money they take, because we do not have figures we could stand behind. There are no review counts, no ratings and no testimonials. Arithmetic appears only as clearly labelled illustration with round numbers, describing no real account.
• No accusations. No group, project, channel, token or person is named as an offender anywhere here. Patterns are describable; naming a party requires evidence and a process this desk does not have, and getting it wrong would harm somebody uninvolved.
• No legal advice. We can describe what regulators publish. We cannot tell you what the law is where you live, what your position is, or what any authority will do. Those questions belong to a qualified professional in your own country and we will always say so rather than guess.
• No blame directed at people who lost money. These arrangements are built to be convincing and they work on ordinary judgement under time pressure. A page that treats its reader as the problem is not a protective page.

What is out of scope

This desk does not review products, rank vendors, or tell you whether any particular tool is worth buying. It does not offer trading advice, price opinions or predictions of any kind. It does not investigate specific incidents, and it cannot look into something that happened to you.

It also does not attempt to keep up with vocabulary. New terms arrive constantly and most of them are renamings. The site is built around structural questions instead, because custody, money flow and what can be checked afterwards do not change when the words do.

Dates, updates and corrections

Every article shows a modified date. Pages are updated when the underlying facts change or when something is wrong, and nothing here is ever backdated to look older or more established than it is.

If you find an error, tell us and we will fix it. Corrections to a factual claim are made to the page itself rather than appended as a note, because the purpose of these pages is to be right when somebody reads them rather than to preserve a record of how they were once wrong. Corrections that change the meaning of a page are described in the page text.

The fastest route is the contact page. Include the page and the specific sentence, and a source if you have one.

Where to start reading

If you have just met the phrase, begin with what is a pump bot, which defines all four meanings in one place. If somebody has put a specific offer in front of you, go straight to the tool-or-scheme checklist and run it. If something has already happened, what to do afterwards is written for that moment and is honest about how it usually goes.