The founder of the BitClout non-fungible token marketplace, who goes by the alias Diamondhands, revealed to CoinDesk the names of investors who backed the project. Earlier some members of the crypto community suspected the startup of fraud.
The list includes Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Arrington Capital, Polychain, Pantera, Digital Currency Group (the parent company of CoinDesk), Huobi, Variant and others.
The Block analyst Frank Chaparro confirmed this information. According to him, after speaking with Coinbase, “it’s safe to say that all of these investments are real”.
I’ve confirmed with Coinbase and it’s safe to say all of these investments are legit. I haven’t been following this closely bc I’ve been heads down on other projects but there’s serious capital behind this (and an equal amount of serious hate/litigation). Will be exiting to watch
— Frank Chaparro (@fintechfrank) March 23, 2021
Nick Carter of Castle Island Ventures questioned whether BitClout is a scam. In an interview with the publication, he said that people “are using that term too loosely”.
“I think that in it [the project] there are certainly features characteristic of Ponzi schemes, but the same as everyone else now,” noted Carter.
The founder of Summa, James Prestwich, criticized BitClout in a comment to the publication. He pointed to the lack of a way to withdraw tokens, which are needed to interact with the platform.
BitClout is marketed as a decentralized social network. Diamondhands added that the team hides their identities. In his words, this keeps the project “decentralized in spirit as well as in fact”.
According to white paper, BitClout uses “a self-developed blockchain with architecture similar to Bitcoin”. The project offers the ability to purchase coins tied to the names of the owners of 15,000 well-known Twitter accounts, including Elon Musk and Katy Perry.
According to BitClout Pulse, at the time of writing the top three most popular “identity tokens” are Elon Musk ($71 682), Naval Ravikant ($46 052) and Chamath Palihapitiya ($43 310).
Data: BitClout Pulse.
Earlier, CipherBlade’s Rich Sanders found that BitClout funds were to three cryptocurrency platforms. They then moved to other wallets and exchanges, including the Hydra darknet marketplace.
Subscribe to ForkLog’s channel on YouTube!