A new chapter in the exciting SafeMoon saga. In the previous one, Coffeezilla introduced the story, explained how the token functions, and took us through the first part of the alleged rug pull. This time, we go straight to the project’s operators slowly extracting liquidity in various forms. And then, we get to Project Pheonix. And no, that’s not a typo. In the meantime, the Internet’s detective explains why SafeMoon was never going to fly.
For this part of the investigation, the first thing Coffeezilla did was to look at the blockchain and identify all of SafeMoon’s wallets. “I found that Kyle had already been rug pulling SafeMoon since it started, just more slowly than the Bee token guys.” As a reminder, SafeMoon is based on Bee token’s model and tokenomics. And, like their predecessors, the SafeMoon team was allegedly removing liquidity.
“On March 5th this shows up on the blockchain as the function “remove liquidity.” Which, of course, they said it was impossible. And the first time they took from the cookie jar, it wasn’t for much, only $14000 was taken. But it added up over time. And I worked with a blockchain researcher to find out just how much Kyle took”.
The result: 164T SafeMoon tokens. That’s trillions with a “T.” In the period when this happened, mid-September to mid-December, those tokens were worth $10.3M. As a reminder, Kyle was the project’s creator. From this point on, he takes a backseat to the other characters in this saga.
SafeMoon’s Satoshi Nakamoto
Coffeezila starts with hyperbole while describing Thomas Smith AKA “Papa,” the project’s lead developer, “the SafeMoon people thought Papa was the reincarnation of Satoshi Nakamoto, and that he was gonna usher SafeMoon into a golden age of prosperity.” And continues with grave accusations, “In reality, Papa just stole more money.” How did he do it, though? With a slightly more elaborate scheme than Kyle.
If you don’t remember how the token works, go to the previous chapter and read the description. If that’s not a problem, know that Papa proposed migrating the original SafeMoon to a second version. And allegedly used that story to slowly rug pull people:
“What was supposed to happen in migration is that he would move the BNB/ SafeMoon pair from v1 to v2 (…) Instead, Papa did something different. He took the BNB pair from v1 but kept the SafeMoon, and he only put the BNB into the v2 pool with a purchase of SafeMoon. Meaning, Papa got more SafeMoon from the v2 contract as well.
Now, on the surface, this appeared to cause the price to spike because a huge purchase order was just made, but in reality, Papa was keeping gigantic amounts of SafeMoon that he could later sell for a personal profit and the value of SafeMoon, overall, was falling.”
So, SafeMoon was fiat inflation with extra steps. Once again, Coffeezilla turned to his researchers to find out exactly how much money did Papa and friends make.
“Here what we found (…) Thomas withdrew liquidity 18 different times. He actually held on to 143 million dollars worth of liquidity. The sum of outgoing SafeMoon transactions was about a hundred million dollars. Of that hundred million, fifty-eight point nine million dollars went to Bitmart, and 8.1 million dollars went to other undisclosed wallets.”
SFM price chart on GATEIO| Source: SFM/USDT on TradingView.com
Project Pheonix
“Things are about to get much worse,” Coffeezilla warns before giving the mic to Bootsy, an independent researcher. Apparently, the company’s CEO “John (Karony) started talking about Project Phoenix. Which he then changed to “Pheonix,” because he spelled it wrong and then refused to admit that he made a spelling error.” That says everything we need to know about John Karony. And something’s up with this “Pheonix” stuff, because “the rest of the team doesn’t talk about it at all.”
In a video, John Karony tries to explain Project Pheonix and gives the interviewer the worst word salad ever uttered. According to Bootsy, the project “started out as banking the unbanked in Africa,” and about “how it was going to be utilized as a currency in Gambia.” Then, it changed and “became about windmills, and clean energy.” About burning tokens with those windmills, or about nanotechnology. “It makes no sense,” Bootsy closes with.
In the end, SafeMoon settled for windmills and energy, but nobody understood what did that had to do with anything else. And then, someone discovered that the design for the windmills was stolen from another company. “The fact that SafeMoon didn’t build the technology in their tech demo seems like a bit of an issue,” Coffeezilla says.
Then, the Internet’s detective brings up another one of the project’s failures. “SafeMoon launched their own crypto wallet which was supposed to replace the popular Trust Wallet app.” The thing is, the app is nothing but a clone of the Trust Wallet app with their design, colors, and logo. “This is right in line with SafeMoon’s business practices from the very beginning,” Coffeezilla kills them with. Just in time for this second chapter to end.
Featured Image: Coffeezilla screenshot from the video | Charts by TradingView