1/ Welcome to the bull run of 2020/2021. It’s up only (was), valuations are at ATH, and your favorite influencer can be a VC.
New funds pop up on a weekly basis yet at the same time invest/incubate a billion projects at once. How are they so efficient you might ask?
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2/ Let me introduce you to Moonrock Capital.
In 2018 Johnathon Habicht & Simon Dedic founded Blockfyre; a blockchain advisory firm based in Germany. In 2020 this was acquired by Tixl. In between that period in 2019 Moonrock Capital was formed by them.
3/ After the Scott Melker incident someone close to the team at Moonrock & Blockfyre messaged me about the firm and all that went on.
Let’s dive into two of the projects ($POLK & $PMON) incubated by Moon Rock Capital a bit deeper to see if they did set the “standard”.
4/ Polkamon ($PMON)
As one of the largest marketing failures this bull run the chart exemplified suspicious activity.
In doing so I reviewed the entire transaction history from launch to June. Below is a brief summary of my findings.
5/ It’s clear the only thing that MoonRock helped them succeed with was pump investors/insiders funds and dump on retail.
Below is the typical lifecycle of the “Moon Rock incubation standard”.
6/ Polkamarkets ($POLK)
As another incubation you might think $PMON was a one time event.
Below is a graph with all of the largest (cumulative) sells in the first 4 weeks. Many of the wallets received tokens from other IDO’s as well.
7/ Now you’re starting to see the pattern? If you’re still not convinced here are some other projects that they invested in.
I’ve included the investment announcement date, token launch date, and ATH date in the chart.
($KYL, $DAFI, $LKR, $CGG)
8/ All your favorite CT influencers work with the VC’s and Marketing firms for a collective shilling campaign. Many do not disclose they were compensated in some capacity. They are placed into groupchats organized by people like Danny Les (for $PMON & $POLK)
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Perhaps you think that the teams at $PMON & $POLK were taken advantage of. A couple of the founders on the $POLK & $PMON team worked at Tixl which Blockfyre was acquired by. All of who Moon Rock worked closely with previously.
10/ Other VC’s have sprung up and do the exact same thing.
The larping VC model includes: little to no vesting period, shilling campaign, use noob friendly buzzwords, ponzi tokenomics designed to benefit VC’s at launch.
11/ Here are possible solutions that hopefully more VC’s should follow.
⁃Dont share the cap table with larping VC’s that dump instantly
⁃Make transparency status quo
⁃Regulation
This will help wash out the bad actors that give the crypto space a bad name.
12/ Follow for more threads in the future!
13/
A huge thanks to the team at @LedgerQL for providing me with the entire history of DEX trades for $POLK & $PMON. Can’t wait for the fully functioning site to be live.
Also a thanks to @mathieu_ouioui for helping give me a second eye by reviewing my analysis .
14/ Sources:
Refer to the files below for data dumps for Polychain Monster (Polkamon) & Polkamarkets.
1/ An investigation into how the threat actor Serpent went from a pro Fortnite player to helping steal $3.5M via meme coin scams launched from 9+ account compromises on X & IG and gambling the proceeds away at online casinos.
2/ Serpent (SerpentAU) is a former pro Fortnite player from Australia who was released from the esports organization ‘Overtime’ after being caught allegedly cheating in June 2020.
He then co-founded the NFT project DAPE in March 2022 which later rug pulled.
3/ In March 2024 Serpent launched another project called ERROR which rug pulled and got him banned from X.
1/ Over the past few months I have been tracking a series of related compromises for McDonald’s, Usher, Kabosu Owner, Andy Ayrey, Wiz Khalifa, SPX 6900, etc on X & IG which has resulted in an estimated $3.5M+ stolen via launching Pump Fun meme coins.
2/ On Aug 21, 2024 the McDonald’s IG became compromised and a post was made promoting the bundled meme coin GRIMACE and the hacker began trolling after.
$690K+ from the pump and dump was consolidated to two wallets.
3/ On Sep 3, 2024 the McDonalds attacker transferred 101.5 SOL to two addresses which deployed and sniped SCHRADER after the Actor Dean Norris had his X account hacked.
1/ An investigation into the social engineering scammer Ronaldd (Ronald Spektor) who allegedly helped steal $6.5M last month from a single victim by impersonating Coinbase support.
2/ A US based victim sent me a DM on Oct 7, 2024 after receiving a call from a spoofed number impersonating Coinbase support where they were coerced in to using a phishing site.
3/ An initial tracing of the theft saw all of the stolen funds flow to eXch on Ethereum and Bitcoin where funds were converted to Litecoin and transferred to numerous services.
1/ Time to share how SCALE, NTD, TPU, & OPSEC projects were all tied to the same person Zopp0 to farm naive traders using numerous influencers shown in leaked messages.
2/ While paying others to be the face of OPSEC behind the scenes he was involved with key decisions as the owner in private Telegram chats.
Here is him talking about the lack of technical research.
I then confronted him over DM about this in March 2024 which he downplayed.
Then in a leaked private chat here is him chatting about me obtaining this screenshot.
3/ Zopp0 and his friend SZB discuss how they messed up bundling for NTD/TPU and worry it will trace back to them.
No posts have been made from @NTensorDynamics @tensorspace_ai since April.
1/ Meet Yicong Wang (王逸聪), a Chinese OTC trader who has helped Lazarus Group convert tens of millions of stolen crypto to cash from various hacks via bank transfers since 2022.
2/ A follower reached out to me a few months ago after having their exchange account frozen after completing a P2P transaction with Yicong Wang an OTC who has used pseudonyms like Seawang, Greatdtrader, & BestRhea977
3/ They then shared one of Yicong Wang’s Tron wallet addresses with me from a screenshot of their WeChat conversation.
1/ A short story about how the influencer @0xjaypeg got caught lying to the community three times this weekend about an allocation for a project all for $2.2K.
2/ A project reached out to Jaypeg who agreed to promote a meme coin for 2% of the supply.
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After sending his wallet address in the chat Jaypeg deleted his message and lied saying he never received tokens and claimed it was not his wallet.