What happened to WinPlay.app? It's hard to deny that WinPlay had been shady for quite some time - while they did pay up for a lot of competitions over the last year, there were a lot of red flags.
First - WinPlay was a social engagement platform for crypto projects with a competitive twist - more rewards for more points. Unlike the Telegram bot swamp, however, it was web based with better insight into your rank and current point total.
Initially I trusted them because it was called KuCoin Play. KuCoin is a respected exchange - it's actually my current favorite and you can join without KYC unless you're moving more than 2BTC around per day (!!!). Rewards were deposited to KuCoin and you could trade immediately.
Then, suddenly KuCoin and the platform got into a fight and separated. The platform was renamed WinPlay and the KuCoin branding was removed. The core issue could be a lot of things, including disagreement over inclusion of competing exchanges (which the team did immediately after the split).
Humorously, they never rebranded their fancy graphics and it still showed KuCoin branding.
So far, no cause for concern. Besides, I'm only investing my time and social media influence, right? And to be fair, they did pay out on some competitions and every time I came back it wasn't like investing time in an unknown project - the platform was already known to me.
Over time the mistakes became more common - campaigns would start then disappear, tasks would link to the wrong url and not be possible to complete, plus a few hilarious typos (they asked us to like a twit at some point...). The campaigns would take months to pay out. Even worse, the winners list would drastically shuffle after the campaign closed, particularly for high dollar campaigns. There were rumors that the team was staking the winners list for their own gain. I found my spot slipped significantly on two of the higher prize value competitions, but I did still get something so I can't complain too much.
Then they launched their own DeFi token WNRZ to farm. Why??? I see no purpose, but they had a comp to win it and if I did I might have added liquidity (some of my skin in the game, but not until they deliver). I have a personal rule that if I'm promised something and it doesn't arrive, I don't invest. I avoid "self drops" IEOs, ICOs, and presales except for when I know the project and team rather well.
This was a good principle to follow in this case!
Just a week or so ago they started redirecting the winplay.app web site directly to KuCoin. Somewhat strange given that they broke ties with KuCoin months ago. All winplay subdomains except oddly for the blog subdomain all redirect to KuCoin now. If this was a problem with an active team behind it you know they'd be reassuring people on Twitter and Facebook... but instead it's been silent there for a few months. The team moved on a while ago. The last two months of pending winnings were yet to be distributed... and now you can't see them anymore. I guess they pocketed the prize purse.
Glad I didn't invest in their WNRZ token! Looking at the Uniswap liquidity pool it looks like folks had been drawing out their liquidity over time with the last big bit removed at the end of November. It's now a graveyard. Zoomed in, I thought liquidity was pulled at the end of November. Zooming out though I can see that far more had been removed by October, and what I first saw was just the last little bit of liquidity being pulled.
So what is your opinion - did they plan to scam us before they even launched the WNRZ token, or was WinPlay tired of the job and looking to offload it to the community (but still dropped the project even after the WNRZ token failed)?
Oh -- I'd be remiss to fail to mention that Coinbase Earn is far more reliable. I think I've earned over $200 through that and it's deposited directly into Coinbase. No competition, just a few minutes of watching a video and then a guaranteed reward amount.
