I have the habit to skim through all the emerging projects and check some of them over time. I have some specific ways to measure them that most of the time have nothing to do with trading. Team members, are they anonymous or not? Activity and development - are they making progress as fast as they estimated? Are they actively promoting the project? Do i like how the developers interact with people? Is the entry point easy enough? Do they offer something to early adopter? Is their marketing intelligent enough? Some of them prove themselves after 2-3 years (IOST), some of them piss me off and then have the growth of their life (KSM) and some of them are sending mixed signals.
One of the tokens that are in my dodgy category is CREDIT.
This one started well, with a blockchain wallet similar with Zcash long long time ago.
According to the whitepaper these where the characteristics of the token:
Coin name: TerraCredit
Coin abbreviation: CREDIT
Algorithm: Quark
Address letter: T
RPC port: 43796
P2P port: 43795
Block type: Proof of Stake
Block size: 2 MB
Block Time: 60 Seconds (Re-targeting every block)
Coin Emission Rate: Max. 20 CREDIT per block (Always less due to
burnt fees & unused treasury). 19 CREDIT allocates as
staking/masternode rewards, and 1 to superblock budget payout.
Coin Supply Control: All transaction & zCREDIT minting fees burnt
from coin supply
Coin supply: 86 million coins
Pre-mine amount: 100 m coins
Burn amount: 14m coins
Post-Swap amount: 86 m coins (ratio 1000:1)
Pre-Swap amount: 86 b coins
Privacy Technology: Custom zCREDIT coming in September 2020
Key Features: Custom accumulator check-pointing system
Maximum Coin Supply: • Transaction speed: less than 1 second
PoS Stake Eligibility
Minimum Input Age: 60 blocks
Reward Maturity Confirms: 101 confirms
Wallet Status: Requires wallet kept running & online
Transaction Send Eligibility Minimum Confirm: 6 confirms
Masternode: 50,000 Credit collateral
Master node confirms: 15
Then, after a while, changed into a Web3 app on a website called terrabit 2.0 and the mining seems to be just fake mining and not proper one like it was on the wallet. They got a mini-node where you get stuck for 21 days if you want to unstake. even with this move, because they kind of did something similar with Elrond Gold, the value of the token increased. At this point they got no media presence at all, few pair on the website exchange - BTC, ETH, LTC, USDT, few African fiat (Nigeria naira, South Africa rand, USD) and Unilevel MLM integrated on the platform (I presume this is still a big thing in Nigeria and adjacent countries). Nice website, but no mention about developers, team or anything related to the project, just hype, hype and hype.
Then, it started to look very similar to the Onecoin movement, with referrals and all the noise. At this point i wanted to test it, and i exchange some CREDIT in ETH, but when i tried to get it, i was surprised with a very extensive and dubious KYC. I did it, with almost zero help from the customer service (most of the time seems to be just a robot giving related links to what you ask, but no real person.
Then, you have the Whitepaper, and let me just to quote some stuff out of context:
Our vision extends beyond this Golden age of humanity and thousands of years into the future. We expect that the Credit Blockchain will outlive all of its current users. The platform's design can benefit generations to come. Terra proposes that the Credit App-based wallet should replace centralized mobile money and cash at the same time.
Credit's code will always remain open-source and available for adoption or improvement at any time. Any users wanting to do this will receive the full support, encouragement, and guidance of the TerraCredit DAO. (Please someone show me the open source code if you find it) When we say payments are instant, we mean instant. Credit introduces a higher rate of block production that can handle millions of nodes, all verifying blocks at the same time. Credit can handle millions of transactions in a minute. (If they have a weekend of, they should solve Ethereum network problems)
TerraCredit's robust design requires hackers to control approximately 70.7% of staked coins for a 50% chance of double spending or invalidating a single block. Unlike a PoW network, a PoS hacker would need to attack their financial status if they chose to undertake these actions. In the end, the hacker would stand to lose the most attacking the network.
TerraCredit masternodes utilize Swiftx protocols. Swiftx is a specially designed coding that enables near-instantaneous transactions across the blockchain. These capabilities put TerraCredit in line with major payment processors such as banks or credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard. Keenly, Swiftx transactions take place exclusively within the masternode portion of the TerraCredit blockchain. All functions related to Swiftx take place via a quorum between masternodes. (Now i heard of Swift, but not of SwiftX - quick search said SwiftX is an interactive development environment (IDE) and cross compiler for developing, debugging, and testing firmware code for microcontrollers and microprocessors. For space and radiation-intensive applications, SwiftX is also available for the rad-hard UT69R000 and RTX2010RH microprocessors.)
And to close this so called review, this is the team, with all their fancy titles (no it company ever had these titles, and :
The Founder - Daniele Marco Ronchese - describing himself as 'An international business man and philanthropist with a focus on social and economic development throughout Africa. Key areas: Technology, Mining & Energy.' with a Facebook page made in 22.02.2019, and he discovered Twitter in 27.08.2020. Doesn't look dodgy at all.
Samuel Dokun - franchisee
Ener Octavio Buitrago Camelo - franchisee
Ogechi Nnadi - community manager
Marco Simonetti - financial manager
Oluwaseun Bamgbade - financial controller
Ruslan Kurbatow - support agent, initially i was thinking he is the IT expert, but no, our friend has a Master in Economics at the КНУ (Kyrgyz National University)
Seun George - support manager
But wait for it, we got real informations at the end of the whitepaper.
Project Name: TerraCredit DAO
Coin name: TerraCredit (CREDIT)
Website: https://terra-credit.com
Email: info@terra-credit.com
Nelson Mandela Square.
West Tower, 2nd Floor,
Maude Street,
Sandton,
Johannesburg,
South Africa, 2196
T: + 2711 881 5566
E: info@terra-credit.com
Terra Credit | Updates: https://t.me/terracreditupdates (Our update channel, latest news,
network status and upgrades)
Terra Credit | Telegram group: https://t.me/terracredit
(Our main and original community channel, you need to be in this channel to claim Credit
in any round).
Terra Credit | Price Discussion: https://t.me/Terracreditprice
This group facilitates speculative discussion relating to the price of TerraCredit
(CREDIT).
FaceBook | https://www.facebook.com/pg/Terra-Credit-Project
Twitter | https://twitter.com/TerraCredit
Explorer: https://explorer.terra-credit.com
Source: https://github.com/CREDIT-2-0/TerraCredit
Now, at this moment they started to create a media presence, with 15k followers on Twitter, 15k on telegram and a Bitcointalk forum presence. Then, Linked.in and Facebook. and the job titles changed. Not we got CFO, CCEO and some unnamed linkedin members to help you with customer service. The twitter and Facebook are mainly just used by couple of Terracredit employee to shill the token. But few more members joined, so now they are 14 employee, including Mister President/Founder of TerraCredit, as if we did not read all the previous documents - the one and only Apostle Dr. Ogochukwu is the president and founder of Excellent Christian Ministries International Inc. An all encompassing network of ministries. Apostle is a seasoned preacher, healing evangelist and prophet blessed with the ability to reveal deep meanings and mysteries both from the scriptures and also by gifting. Many have been blessed by his ministrations of instant healings and accurate word of knowledge dealing with issues of their lives. He is a humble preacher and also an entrepreneur.
Hmm, the plot is thickening. So, github is mentioned, let's see what is there. They mention the project is a fork of PIVX, good i like this one. And there are some updates 5 and 7 months ago. I can see Python, C and C++, but most of the codes are from PIVX, and no trace of Swiftx (i really wanted to learn more about something that help you to have million of transactions per second). Somebody started something in here, but didn't followed. And wow, PIVX is a very busy project, with many very active people. I have seen some nice work in progress there. But let's go back.
The address mentioned is some very luxurious office rented from Regus, and wow, that is a nice place. The Nigerian address is:
Office Address :
No. 83 Rumuola Road
Near peoples club of Nigeria,
Port Harcourt
Not Lagos or Abuja, not even Ibadan. I wonder why?
Shall i finish with this?
Their latest campaign, and i have a couple of issues with this. First, according to the 5 million Credit i was holding, who later become 5.000 CREDIT 2.0, the value went from 170 to 17$ (it is amazing that CREDIT token is still available on Hotbit and Catex), so according to my math the value went 90% down, not 24569.74% up. Second, 'unbank the planet' is probably stolen and reused from Celsius 'Unbank Yourself' campaign. The work unicorn is also a red flag, as nobody knows what you can offer before you are offering. Red flags everywhere you look.
My personal idea is that they started locally, probably having a rug pull in mind, but then the crypto bull market started to be on sight, and they went global, even if all the info is pointing at some African aimed scam. I may be wrong, I may be right, you need to do your own research anyway.
That's all for today!
Yours truly
George
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Thanks for introducing new cryptocurrency to us.