On November 26, 2025, APTM, the token at the centre of the DAO1 investment operation, reached an all time low of 39.2 cents. It had lost 53 percent of its value since being listed on CoinMarketCap in May of that year. Over the same stretch, traffic to the DAO1 website fell roughly 40 percent month on month, down to approximately 22,700 visits in November. Eight months earlier, the Texas State Securities Board had cited the token’s performance in the opposite direction, describing what it called an insane 8,000 percent increase in value.
The decline has been attributed to executives and investors cashing out at a rate that outpaced internal trading and the arrival of new investment. That is the ordinary arithmetic of any scheme whose token price depends on more money entering than leaving.
Where the Traffic Went
The geography of DAO1’s audience shifted sharply across 2025. In August, web traffic tracked by SimilarWeb came predominantly from the Dominican Republic at 35 percent, the United States at 18 percent and Germany at 16 percent. By November the distribution had changed to Germany at 62 percent, the Dominican Republic at 24 percent and the United Kingdom at 8 percent.
That concentration into Germany happened in the weeks after BaFin issued its October 2 consumer warning stating that DAO1 was operating in Germany without the required permission. Recruitment in Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, fell away after those regulators issued their own warnings in early 2025.
An 8,000 Percent Rise, Then This
The Texas order of March 2025 recorded the metrics the operation was citing at its peak: 22,000 unique wallets, more than 268,000 transactions on the blockchain, $3.5 million in assets transferred, and the 8,000 percent price increase. Those figures were presented by the regulator as evidence that the scheme had already proven highly successful, which was the reason it considered emergency action necessary.
Nine months later the token was at 39 cents. In June 2026 DAO1 collapsed and was rebooted within weeks as APTM DAO, presented with a MinerBot product. A feeder operation called Run Run Run appeared in August 2026. The pattern of collapse followed by rapid relaunch under a new name has repeated through GSPartners, Swiss Valorem Bank, GSPro, Billionico, Auratus, DAO1 and now APTM DAO.
What Texas Cited on the Way Up
The 8,000 percent figure came from the Texas State Securities Board’s March 2025 emergency order, which cited it as evidence the scheme had already proven highly successful and that emergency action was therefore necessary. The order also recorded 22,000 unique wallets, more than 268,000 transactions on the blockchain and $3.5 million in assets transferred.
It alleged the token was being marketed as a lucrative investment opportunity notwithstanding whatever limited utility it had paying gas fees on its own network, and that the respondents were acting to inflate its price by increasing demand while restricting supply.
The Collapse and the Relaunch
By June 2026 APTM was down 84.56 percent year on year. DAO1 announced it was terminating its trading bot investment scheme on 16 June and its multi-level marketing operation on 15 June. Within weeks it reappeared as APTM DAO, with the trading bots relabelled minerbots, operating from two domains privately registered on 9 June, three days before the Apertum event in Hong Kong at which the relaunch was announced.
A further spinoff, Run Run Run Club, appeared on a privately registered domain on 28 July 2026. Neither site discloses ownership or executive information. The sequence of collapse followed by rapid relaunch under a new name has repeated through GSPartners, Swiss Valorem Bank, GSPro, Billionico, Auratus, DAO1 and now APTM DAO.
Why the Direction of Travel Was Always Down
A token whose price depends on new buyers arriving faster than existing holders sell has only one possible trajectory once recruitment slows. The decline has been attributed to DAO1 executives and investors cashing out at a rate outstripping internal trading and the arrival of new investment. That is not a market accident. It is the arithmetic of the structure.
The pattern regulators describe in these cases is that early participants can exit at a profit precisely because later ones are still entering, and that the position reverses the moment the inflow stops. Six national regulators warning about the operation across eighteen months is a reasonably effective way of stopping an inflow.
Guidance for retail investors in crypto asset offerings makes the point directly: a token price is not evidence of an underlying business, and a rising price attracts the buyers whose money sustains it.
Conclusion
In March 2025 a Texas regulator cited an 8,000 percent rise as grounds for emergency action. By November the token was worth 39.2 cents, having lost half its value since listing six months earlier, with traffic down 40 percent in a single month. The decline has been attributed to insiders and early investors cashing out faster than new money arrived, which is the only way a token like this ever falls. What remained was an audience 62 percent German, concentrated there in the weeks after Germany said the operation had no licence to sell. Seven months later the whole thing collapsed and reopened under a new name.
