Written by: Wang 1, TechFlow
The crypto market is never short of big news, even well-known projects are no exception.
Last night, @Rahul__Ghangas, who claimed to be an intern in the Polygon community, posted a 34-paragraph expose on Twitter, claiming that Polygon executives colluded with outsiders to maliciously manipulate the profits of the Meme project ELECOIN, and accused it of misleading and exploiting community developers.
At the same time, the post was accompanied by a large number of screenshots of chat records, making the revelations and accusations more substantial.
TechFlow summarized the whole story in this post.
Personnel Disclosure
Rahul started the post by revealing a list of the main people involved in this incident through a screenshot of a TG group chat:
@0xkenzi Kenzi Wang - Partner at Symbolic Capital, Advisor at Polygon
@jack_venture Jack Lu - Co-founder of multibit, bouncebit, Partner of @NGC_Ventures
@sourcex44 Sanket Shah - Head of Strategy at Polygon Labs
@0xsachi Sachi Kamiya - Polygon Ventures initial team member
@mscryptojiayi Jiayi Li - Co-founder of Salus security
@shawncgeek Shawn Chong - COO of Salus Security and investor in BounceBit
The fuse of the incident started when Polygon team senior staff, VC partners and project co-founders jointly organized a group to create a meme.
In the above picture provided by the whistleblower, the chat records show that before the official promotion of ELECOIN, the internal team was carrying out some preparatory work, including communicating in the TG group on matters such as chip distribution, personnel statistics, and Meme narratives, which was obviously in preparation for the event.
Conspiring to create a meme
On January 3, 2024, many KOLs gathered in a Telegram group and planned to promote the Meme coin ELECOIN under the name of "Indian Meme". The whistleblower Rahul tweeted that the token had a "secret TGE" at the end of 2023, and most of the token supply had been acquired by insiders . At the same time, the project promised all developers and KOLs to pay them for their work as soon as possible (in the form of USDC).
The team’s marketing plan for ELECOIN
The team plans to use Polygon founder Sandeep ’s pet elephant as a medium to promote the ELECOIN story, and hopes to promote ELECOIN topic hype by having Sandeep post photos of his pet elephant. This idea has been supported by Polygon’s “Top Level People” .
Rahul joked that " this plan sounds ridiculous, but people will still buy into this kind of story in a bull market. "
Plan advancement
After finalizing the plan, the team began to actively promote marketing by posting and promoting the product through various social media channels, with the goal of reaching 5,000 followers as soon as possible.
On the first day of the event, something was obviously wrong: the team that organized the event had not paid any compensation for promotional marketing and project development, and it was all up to the developers and marketers to pay out of their own pockets.
The whistleblower Rahul joined the project later and was responsible for a very small scale, mainly helping ELECOIN to complete the website production. He said that it was Polygon consultant Kenzi Wang who authorized him to access the ELECOIN domain name. For this reason, Rahul also repeatedly confirmed through other channels that the TG account he communicated with belonged to Kenzi Wang himself.
@Rahul__Ghangas Conversation with Kenzi Wang
Since Rahul was not kicked out of the group chat after delivering the project, he witnessed for the next three months how the rich used other people’s time and money to maliciously sell, mentally manipulate and blatantly defraud at no cost.
The show begins
In the first few days of the plan, in the face of some early participants selling, the team also actively repurchased to maintain the appearance that ELECOIN is a reliable and stable project. As the plan progressed normally, the highlight of ELECOIN promotion came: the team planned to attract traffic and develop the community by tagging Sandeep on Twitter and "attracting" Sandeep to participate in the project.
The team plans to interact with Sandeep
Of course, all of this was planned in advance, from Sandeep's first interaction with the ELECOIN official account to Sandeep changing his Twitter profile picture to the elephant meme (which is a bit like imitating the rise of Silly tokens caused by the founder of Solana changing his profile picture to SillyDragon). The poster believes that every step of the development of the incident has been carefully designed by ELECOIN and even the entire Polygon senior team.
Interaction between ELECOIN official account and Sandeep
The truth came out
After a series of careful planning, ELECOIN successfully gained the desired popularity. However, what followed was a three-month long sell-off by early participating wallets, but no one could blame the sell-off from early participating wallets on the project insiders, because these early wallets were new addresses created before the $ELE was released, and the funds came from the exchange. Faced with the endless sell-off, the developers and marketing team participated in the project construction for free with the expectation of promised rewards and the idea of seizing the "big opportunity" (many people even paid out of their own pockets to maintain the project construction). Until one night, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse, and $ELE tokens were sold in large quantities. In less than two weeks, the total market value dropped sharply from 17m to 2m. All early participating wallets began to sell in large quantities, and the team members who had been working for free exploded.
Team members expressed dissatisfaction on TG
Although these early participating wallets were careful enough, some clues were still found: some people pointed out that some of the addresses belonged to Jiayi Li and Shawn Chong.
These two are the co-founder and COO of Salus Security mentioned at the beginning of the article.
Obviously, the selling pressure came from friendly forces.
In response, Jiayi Li claimed that the internal sell-off was due to infighting within the initial team. She would buy back some tokens in her personal name and provide $5,000 as a marketing budget.
Jiayi Li explains the reason for the sell-off to the team
In response to Jiayi Li's statement, whistleblower Rahul mocked it in a tweet: "How generous!"
From the organization of the event to the final discovery of the internal sell-off, although we are currently unable to confirm the authenticity of these chat screenshots, based on the revelations themselves, it is clear that Polygon executives and external personnel are jointly manipulating ELECOIN.
After revealing the whole thing, the whistleblower Rahul also confronted Polygon consultant Kenzi Wang and bouncebit co-founder Jack Lu, bluntly accusing the two of past and ongoing fraud.
Whistleblower Rahul said, "If bad fraudsters are not punished, the web3 ecosystem will not be able to realize its transformative potential... We need to cultivate a culture of transparency, integrity and respect. When executives abuse their power and position to do evil, they must be held accountable. Using others for personal gain is contrary to the spirit on which the industry is built."
Conclusion
Regarding Rahul's lengthy revelations and angry accusations, no relevant person has yet explained the incident.
Regarding this big melon, the price of $Matic has not fluctuated significantly. Perhaps this incident has not yet fermented on a large scale, or the market has become accustomed to this kind of evil that "has nothing to do with itself".
There is nothing new under the sun. The Meme trend, fueled by financial nihilism, was originally intended to resist fraud and manipulation hidden in the dark, but the hand of evil seems to have reached into this field. Meme, which advocates freedom, fairness and culture, has not been immune to the manipulation and usurpation of interest groups.
The Memecoin in your hand may not represent "your freedom"; the rise you see may be the result of manipulation by interest groups.
As the "grassroots team theory" becomes increasingly true, players should gradually become disenchanted with any top-level project.
Being in the crypto world, cherish every moment you have.
