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?
👇👇👇
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)
9/
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.
2/ The theft address I will start from is 0x6ee which was doing test transactions on July 10th from 0x09b multisig with SHIB and was funded with 6 X 0.1 ETH from Tornado.
0x6eedf92fb92dd68a270c3205e96dccc527728066
A technical breakdown of the attack by Mudit can be found below
3/ With the 6 X 0.1 ETH withdrawals from Tornado Cash on July 10th I was able to demix this and find 6 X 0.1 ETH matching deposits made the day before.
0xc6873ce725229099caf5ac6078f30f48ec6c7e2e
The demix is accurate as 0xc68 was also doing tests with 0x304 multisig on July 9th with SHIB.
For those who are confused and need additional context.
Earlier today Arkham announced a $150K bounty for the identity of the DJT creator
11:49 pm UTC I reply to Arkham saying I submitted for the bounty
11:57 pm UTC Martin Shkreli panic DM’s me
12:27 am UTC Martin Shkreli creates a spaces and announces he is the creator of DJT
One of the large DJT insiders verso.sol dumping $832K worth of DJT and then depositing USDC to CEX ~1 hr ago
Coincidentally also a large holder on Martin’s other project Shoggoth
1/ Here is an overview of one of the better executed scams I have seen in recent times so I figured I would share with the community as a cautionary tale.
A few weeks ago I received a DM from a follower who lost $245K after accidentally downloading malware onto their computer.
2/ It started as an account purporting to be Peter Lauten from a16z, messaging a team to inquire about a potential podcast partnership.
3/ The attacker noticed that the real Peter Lauten had changed his X (Twitter) username from ‘peter_lauten’
to ‘lauten’ at a point in time and then had claimed his old username.
3/ At first the attacker communicated with the Prisma deployer the attack was whitehat.
Later that day all of the funds were deposited to Tornado Cash contradicting that statement.
The exploiter began making outrageous demands and asked for a $3.8M (34%) whitehat bounty
This amount is significantly higher than the industry standard 10% essentially extorting the team as the treasury does not have sufficient assets to reimburse users.