Good morning all,
After a really busy weekend, i have decided to post about the Highpoint scandal. Although we never had any money invested with them, what has happened made me feel .....well i can't pinpoint one single emotion, it was a mix of disbelief, shock and disappointment
We follow OliverOnChain and the Defi army and although sometimes his style can be a bit over the top, what he is actually talking about is good, he wants the Defi space to be cleaned up, less scams and more good projects for people to invest in. In my mind that is a great idea, as even though we do our research we have still invested in scams or rug pulls. I often feel a bit foolish for having done that but try to use these mistakes as lessons in what not to do in the future and seeing as we are not the only ones makes me feel slightly less silly for doing so.
When we watched the You tube video whilst having lunch (i will post a link if anyone is interested) i could not believe what i was hearing as one of the management team and founders Kevin Vu of Highpoint was being interviewed, virtually the first words he said was that Highpoint rebasing protocol was a scam. Then he said all the rebasing protocols were scams. Kevin also mentioned thet the developer he used was one that Simsala from Sphere recommended to him. That in itself was bad enough but it got worse because as the video went on Kevin said they moved the investors money from the treasury to the liquidity pool, but also stopped the rebasing. This meant that they stopped the investors from withdrawing their funds which is something they said they would not do. It got worse still!! The Highpoint team decided that as they were not able to trace all the wallets of their investors that they would just withdraw the money themselves and use it to start a new project called Omniverse.
While watching this one of the things that bothered me was Kevin's attitude, there were no apologies, no remorse and at one point it sounded to me like he was saying it was silly of the people to invest in their project so more fool them.
When kevin was pulled up on how wrong this was and that the investors should have been able to get their money out, he kept saying that they had not actually taken the money because they were using it for the new project! In his mind there was nothing wrong with doing that.
This then set me on a mission to add a few names and protocols (quite a lot really) on to my 'naughty list' which then led me to the people that had KYC'ed Highpoint.
The Obsidian Council
'community and trust as a service' this is their motto and they say their purpose is to 'allow anonymous crypto teams to build trust with their communities without making their identities public.'
This all sounds great and trustworthy untill you go through their website as they have now removed most of the legacy projects that were previously there so it now looks like there was only one rug pull project they KYC'ed and all funds from that had been returned. There were a lot more of these rug pulls before they changed the site. At least i have more names on my naught list now as it looks like the people on the Obsidian council have some big conflicts of interest, where they have promoted the scams on You tube, been paid for it and then KYC'ed the people in the said projects.
I think a weekend of delving into this put us on heightened alert as we are seeing red flags everywhere, so we have moved some of our investments around, but that is a post for another day.
Stay safe in the wild west that is Defi.
As always thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.
