Understanding Transparency: Protecting the Community
The Defense Breed emphasizes the importance of transparency, safety, and risk mitigation above all else. To fulfill the true spirit of decentralization requires honesty and integrity by all parties involved.
During our last AMA (Ask Me Anything) event with the Breeds, blog posts were created by two of the Breeds most commonly known by the community, Defense and Growth. This was specifically to bring more understanding to the realm of transparency and show how two of the Breeds operated, and worked for the community.
In order to protect the Ecosystem from malicious projects taking advantage of the community, we do extensive research in forming our internal investigations. While these investigations are being conducted, the Breeds do not comment on anything publicly. The importance of this is threefold: to begin examining the public information that we collect from the blockchain itself, to establish an understanding of the community’s sentiment, and to give ourselves enough time to produce a well-formed statement about our findings.
The Defense Breed did not want to write this blog due to the privacy of others but due to the allegations we feel like we need to be transparent to the community and for the SHIB ecosystem. We have no plans on continuing any childish back-and-forth dialogue between parties.
Examining the Blockchain
While blockchain information is public, we need to be certain we are reading the information accurately and making informed decisions. In several cases, a project might look great from the outside, but digging through the blockchain can reveal the ugly truth. At the end of the day we, as a team and project, do not want to hurt any outside tokens or projects, but we must provide a level of transparency that the community will both understand and accept as it relates to the circumstance in question.
Gauging Community Sentiment
The community’s sentiment is extremely important to us. After all, we do what we do for the community. That’s why it is important for us to be able to see how the community responds to a new project making an entrance into our space without our actions influencing their opinions.
Issuing Statements
The time it takes for the Defense Breed to produce a statement will vary from case to case. Not every examination is the same and the findings vary wildly. In some instances, we may be able to produce a statement within a few days, sometimes it can take longer. For the most part, the time we take is to ensure that we are able to form a statement that is well-informed, accurate, thoughtful, structured, and concise because the community deserves nothing less.
The Departure of Steven Cooper
The events that led up to the departure of Steven Cooper and his “burning” initiative, was centered around the topic of the Welly’s food chain and playing music. Additionally, Welly’s had asked for specific details to the money burned for their business records and Steven Cooper did not want to provide any of that information to them. The only information he elected to provide was that tokens would be sent to the VB dead wallet (0xdead…42069) and either wouldn’t, or couldn’t explain further.
It is important to understand the context of the entire communique, incoming and outgoing, from the community and the Breeds, due to Steven Cooper choosing to walk away of his own volition before any of the talks regarding partnerships had concluded.
Before Welly’s confirmed any partnerships with Cooper, the Welly’s team reached out to a few of our Defense & Growth team members as they were concerned about the lack of information Cooper was relaying to them with regards to transparency and what he could and couldn’t do “easily” because of royalties. For the sake of transparency, it should be known that there were three people who were not part of the initial conversation and who were brought in by the Welly’s Team at this point to further address the issue of transparency: Baysed, Trophias, and U_B.
In the text chat, that took place prior to the 67 minute voice call, Cooper wanted Trophias to dox themselves by adding Cooper’s “team member” as a contact on Whatsapp or Telegram, which would have exposed their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Trophias refused since our team greatly values anonymity in this space, like everyone should. Unfortunately, Cooper chose to dismiss Trophias’ concerns about exposing PII, ignoring them all together.
🛡️Important: A full chat export is available upon request. Please contact a Defense member on Discord for the records.
Furthermore, Cooper says he recorded the voice chat with “a lot of private information” in an attempt to suggest that there’s evidence of some sort of a secret disagreement. From the Defense and Growth Breed’s angle, that conversation went over extremely well and he was agreeable throughout the entire voice call, never once indicating that he had concerns. We did discuss some topics of tokens and plans with the upcoming wiki that is being built to be centered around the community and how we can help burn projects that provide the level of transparency we would like to have better visibility for their project within it. The conversation that transpired in that call is helpful for understanding what was said in the text chat. This would go on to include burn percentages of his revenue and what he thought was “too hard” to accomplish.
In summary, he says that he was fully transparent, but our question now is, “Why does he think it’s ‘too hard’ to create a playlist specifically for Welly’s, and why did such a trivial detail cause him to walk away?”
Recently, scamming allegations against Cooper have come to light by various members of the community. We encourage the community to read the article linked below in full and form their own opinions based on their findings.
“Cooper wants people to believe that he didn’t scam anyone, but people are already calling him out for doing just that. Cooper had holders fund ‘the ultimate crypto music game’ by purchasing his $6 postcards, and promising to burn thousands in SHIB. He was being silent about the game and started to look for other ways to make money instead. All his tweets mentioning this have been deleted by him.” - ShibInvestor (Source)
Social Media Scammers
It is no secret that the popularity of SHIB has led to an explosion of interest on social media. From loyal SHIB Army members to news media outlets, our growth has been outmatched in the crypto space. However, with such impressive growth often comes equally sizable growing pains. Targeting our community has become a lucrative pastime for scammers looking to siphon money from investors to fill their own pockets. While the spirit of decentralization celebrates individual freedom and contributions, it also equally values individual responsibility, self-education, and security.
Following the map laid out by Ryoshi in late 2020 requires a well-informed and protected community to avoid those who wish to do it harm. This is the essence of what the Defense Breed is all about: protecting our wonderfully amazing community and empowering them in fighting back against bad actors in the crypto space.
Speaking of bad actors, the Defense Breed was recently made aware of several predatory projects targeting SHIB holders. As a general rule, we expect to see new projects present honest information and seek natural growth. Unfortunately, this is not what we see in a large portion of projects, and the community is rightfully outraged. In the past days, many various social media influencers on Twitter and YouTube have been accused of manipulating their audiences for profit. Allegations include targeted pump and dump schemes, rugpulls, and blatant lying to artificially grow their audience. Be careful when you see people shilling new projects on social media: time and time again, many of them profit off of manipulating and inveigling their audiences. It's easy to be tricked! Always be skeptical, especially of paid influencers. Scammers are masters of deception.
After the discussion that took place in our last Growth x Defense Breed AMA, ShibaBurn’s project scheduled their own AMA and falsely stated that Defense Breed members Stixil and Trophias, and SHIB Project Lead Shytoshi were going to be featured as special guest speakers: answering questions on behalf of their project, to apologize for characterizing them as potentially unsafe, and to promote buying their token. This was obviously a ploy to appear legitimate by misleading SHIB holders into believing that this event was officially endorsed by the SHIB team.
During the AMA, the ShibaBurn team were making statements implying that the SHIB team had ignored their project. In reality, we were never contacted by the ShibaBurn project to be present in any discussion, or to coordinate any times to set a meeting up. The AMA that was scheduled was done without any of the SHIB Team’s acknowledgement, and without any proper planning by the ShibaBurn project. Afterwards, a tweet was then put up to try and paint a narrative that the SHIB Team dismissed and had no time for them.
“Thank you everyone who turned up to listen. Its a shame the shib guys had no time to turn up but i think that says it all conspiracies as far as we and anyone who joined are concerned are squashed. Hope you all have a lovely end to your weekend guys and thanks again” - @Shibaburnerc20
During this AMA, ShibaBurn Token ambassador Duncan Gray made the following false claims to the community.
“I just want to say that Shytoshi and Milkshake are 100% behind this project. I mean… they… they are not against it in any way. They are 100% behind burns. There should be no concern. There should be no worries about this. This is…this is a wonderful project which people should adhere to…should accept…you know, it’s something which, you know, people should come to. And so you really shouldn’t have any worries about it.” - Duncan Gray (Audio)
Safe to say, our community was displeased with such claims, and rightfully so. Let us be crystal clear: Shiba Inu does not support any of these false claims about Shytoshi and Milkshake, and they will not be tolerated in any capacity. Deception is not decentralization. Unfortunately, lies of this caliber are pathological, and those who fabricate them rarely back down. The SHIB Defense team has been repeatedly threatened to stop protecting our community. We are not afraid of scammers. We will not stop protecting the people.
Selling Out Your Fanbase
One of ShibaBurn’s YouTube influencers, Matthew Perry, an official team member for the ShibaBurn token, posted a video on a YouTube channel, “Let It Burn”, reacting to the Twitter block that he received from Trophias’ personal account. To be clear, the block was made because of the continued harassment coming from the ShibaBurn team as well as the deceptive communication that was put out by the ShibaBurn project as a whole.
While doing our preliminary reports on ShibaBurn Token we came upon Matthew Perry's BNB Chain token “Buy The Dip” (Contract:0x284fe3fecb3b3d462446fcfbe262d9c19a42eabb) which a primary purpose of the token was to burn SHIB. The token was created around January 28th and due to the unusual activity of the token, the selloffs and lack of transparency of burns, we had many concerns. In a Youtube video Matthew Perry claims he does not have devs and that is the reason for the project falling. It created a red flag to the Defense Team when his name was attached to this new token only weeks later. The Youtube Channel also related to Matthew Perry named “LET IT BURN” changed from a shorts channel to a shib burn channel on Jan 30th, two days after the ‘’Buy The Dip’’ token came out and has claimed the revenue from the channel was going to burn shib. At the time of this response Matthew has burned 110.75 million shib.
In a statement done yesterday by Matthew Perry (@perry8k), the direct continued harassment is the reason why Trophias blocked most people from this project in the first place. The Defense Breed will not tolerate targeted harassment in any form and is not afraid to stand up to manipulators and those who siphon funds from the SHIB community for unsafe burn tokens.
Research and Security
In terms of security, we always recommend community members do their own research to make informed decisions to protect their investments. While the Defense Breed does a lot of work to inform the community as best we can, when evaluating token safety a fantastic place to start is looking deep into Etherscan. By reviewing the public transaction ledger, you can find a trove of information about a project’s security and safety. A quick search reveals numerous potential security issues with this project, including contract ownership. Briefly, a contract owner can freely execute functions in the token’s contract code and can be used maliciously. This includes the ability to easily and instantly modify buy/sell fees, change marketing wallets, exclude any wallets from fees, disable all selling, blacklist specific accounts from selling, and much more.
You can read the entire contract here.
You might notice the title of the contract: “ShibFenInu”, which is the name of the previous token launched by the owner on BNB Chain.
“Shib Fen Inu, the previous token owned by Kai, was extremely bad since huge dumps were made for an entire month, before “the transition.” Many called it out, but the token was a flop and went under the radar. The only one winning was the owner. It was clear that he was dumping on holders.” - ShibInvestor (Source)
When questioned by the community, ShibaBurn Token shares more misinformation in an attempt to sustain their fraudulent project.
A Community Call to Arms
Echoing community sentiment, we again decry this project as illegitimate and are ashamed that such respected influencers have sacrificed their reputations, valuing profit over people. This is not the way of Ryoshi. Decentralization does not mean we should sit back and allow people to take advantage of the vulnerable, rather we should join together to protect the innocent from the wicked, and fight back against those who intend us harm.
The following quote is taken from an anonymous community member’s excellent Medium article. The entire article, which goes further in detail into allegations against Steven Cooper and other bad actors in the space, is worth reading if you have the time.
“ShibaBurn, uses the Shiba Inu burn tracker’s name in order to appeal to Shiba holders, and confuse them. The ShibaBurn owner sent almost 10% of tokens to a Shib contract just so they can tell users that the “Shiba Inu” team are their biggest holder. Dumb…Unlike ShibaBurn, Shib is completely decentralized. ShibaBurn claims that they are the biggest burn mechanism of Shiba Inu, a lie to lure the Shib community towards them. The owner made it clear that he did not hold Shib and even criticized the token and Shiba Inu devs, but still wants the Shib holders to invest in his token, while using multiple accounts to spam the community.” - ShibInvestor (Source)
Going Forward
One of the many projects that is currently underway is the wiki. The wiki will house all of the official projects under the Shibatoken Ecosystem, along with highlighting our Partnershibs. We also aim at having an educational format to learn about the SHIB Ecosystem and the surrounding Cryptocurrency sphere.
For Burn Projects, we want to also highlight these efforts as well. The wiki will offer a section where we recognize burn projects and highlight community efforts. While things are still in development for this documentation project, our primary goals will be to promote transparency and organization. This is not to verify or have a partnershib request. This is a separate avenue, but a chance to get your project listed on the site if certain guidelines are met. However, this will take some time before we are ready to present it to the public. First and foremost, our Woofpaper V3 will take priority and will be the main focus to get the wiki off the ground. If you would like to contribute to the wiki in the future, keep watch for more information!
Closing Safety Tips from Defense
It's no secret that social media is full of liars and clowns! Here are some common red flags to look out for when determining if an influencer is trustworthy:
🚩 Are they offering you free crypto/airdrops?
🚩 Have they promised massive gains (MOON) if you buy their new token?
🚩 Do they make bold claims (lies) that can't be backed up with any evidence?
🚩 Do they constantly FUD over issues that are clearly explained in our blog posts?
🚩 Are they offering a "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist?
🚩 Do they hide legitimate replies, delete comments, ban, or even threaten users for criticism?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, be careful! SHIB's notoriety and popularity makes it a popular target for scammers to try and take advantage of our wonderful community.
Rule of thumb: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!
While you might think the most common scams involve hacking wallets and phishing for seed phrases, some of the most common scams are done far more sneakily!
Some shady social media influencers are known to take advantage of communities to pump and dump projects, hold fake fundraisers and collect community members funds for personal profit, or even sell merchandise or NFTs purely to profit off of the communities they have hostilely invaded! They may collect personally identifiable information, make grandiose promises of upcoming projects and software applications, or host their own events to siphon money out of community pockets while lying about where the money goes.
Always be skeptical of what you hear from untrusted and unofficial sources.
Always fight FUD with FACTS.