Wonderland Crypto Co-Founder Revealed to Be Infamous Fraudster, Investors Shaken
vice.com
vice.com
"Patryn, who changed his legal name twice, was the co-founder of QuadrigaCX, a Canadian exchange that shut down after Patryn's partner Gerald Cotten suddenly died in India in 2018 while owing users around $190 million in crypto at the time’s exchange rate."
It's literally nothing more than an on-chain ponzi, with no other ostensible purpose than gathering a bunch of assets in its treasury and inflating its token price at some multiple to those assets. It's a form of OlympusDAO (the original flavor of this ponzi), that's designed to be even more leveraged and bubbly.
All of the users of Wonderland literally called it a ponzi. 99% of users were consenting adults who knew exactly how the game worked, and chose to play anyway because they thought it was fun. They call themselves "the frog nation". Not one person in 1000 thought this was a legitimate or sustainable scheme.
Some are acting like this is the crypto equivalent of finding out the CEO of a Wall Street bank is a convicted felon. It'd be more like finding out the CEO of an Atlantic City casino is.
It's easy to point to early price fluctuations caused by speculation and yell "ponzi", but it's actually not dissimilar to the mechanisms & motivations that resulted in the first central banks (e.g. Bank of England) -- except that this time the benefactors are early adopters instead of the crown.
Time will tell how this plays out. Keep in mind: The Central Bank of England was established in the late 1600s, but it wasn't until 1921(!) that the last bank stopped printing their own bank notes -- and some Irish & Scottish banks still today retain that authority given their charter.
Wonderland was shifting to a VC fund model, where Dani and Sifu would get early access to newly launching tokens and buy up seed rounds. Wonderland was just one of Dani's projects that all played into each other, including Popsicle Finance, Abracadabra, and the stablecoin project MIM. Dani is a charismatic, semi-anonymous founder who moves fast.
Furthermore, the issue isn't so black and white. At its peak, Wonderland had a market cap of $2 billion. And it appears that Sifu was rather skilled at managing the funds. Apparently without him, there's no one else to manage the funds so the project will likely be wound down.
OK, but this was #3.
>Welcome to the Wonderland Governance Forum!...
>[WIP #4] - Wind down Wonderland, and give the treasury back to its holders
>The Sifu vote is coming close to an end, currently the vote stands at 86% to remove Sifu. The team feels strongly that this is the best choice for the protocol and it needs to happen as a first step to move forward with Wonderland.
https://twitter.com/Wonderland_fi/status/1487175603296116740
I wonder if Sifu/Patryn/Dhanani will get some grief from law enforcement over the 15,000 eth he seems to have from Quadriga, the bankrupt Canadian exchange he co-founded?
Also don't forget that there are two huge use cases for this stuff that are not going away: money laundering and flight capital from authoritarian countries. Those use cases alone can drive this even higher.
Deflationary things are fixed assets, not currency.
I would be more inclined to get behind a cryptocurrency that correlates liquidity with value.
That's not to say there isn't an argument for inflationary currency. But that argument is centered around the ability to conduct counter-cyclical monetary policy to stabilize the business cycle.
But it's silly to say that deflationary assets are literally impossible to serve as currency, because we have actual historical evidence of deflationary currencies.
That could possibly be built. It's software defined money so it can do anything that can be expressed as a pure function of its state. You could probably make a Keynesian cryptocurrency that dropped money from helicopters when velocity was low, but it would be hard to design it so it wasn't easy to game via wash trading.
(Who says the money supply of USD wasn't too small pre-money printing?)
Actually, if Austrian economics youtube videos were real and inflation was horrible, then switching to crypto would not make you safe - because your government can't control what currency citizens trade in anymore, it can't stop someone else from inventing a popular currency and then suddenly inflating it.
I don't understand how regulators have collectively dropped the ball so hard on this.
Nah...
you don't say...
TSLA theoretically could, plus they can repurchase shares anytime they want. (Or issue new ones, since their shareholders seem desperate to give them money.)
Some cryptocurrencies buy and and burn, others have a DAO that buys assets and holds the assets in a treasury.
Most crypto assets don't pay dividends, and those that do usually pay by devaluing the currency through some staking scheme, instead of by extracting profit by selling something valuable to people.
Given those premises, I'd argue that stocks like AAPL or TSLA are part speculative asset (what you're calling a Ponzi scheme), while most crypto is all speculative asset.
> Given those premises, I'd argue that stocks like AAPL or TSLA are part speculative asset (what you're calling a Ponzi scheme), while most crypto is all speculative asset.
So you're just placing cryptocurrency in the same bracket as a stock that is more iffy than AAPL or TSLA?
I do appreciate your use of "most" instead of "all".
But if you bought every share of TSLA or AAPL you could at least make the company do something.
For BTC specifically, having a monopoly would be similar to having a monopoly on an asset. Either people want it and pay you whatever you ask for it, or nobody wants it and you're left with a bunch of worthless diamonds/gold/property/bitcoin.