Basis Markets Investigation — Part 5— Blockchain — Use of Project Funds
$5.8M USDT went into project funds. How were they used?
TL;DR
After raising ~$7.5M worth of SOL and then $20.725M USDC in the capital raises, $5.8M USDT was transferred into Basis Markets wallet EB5V to be used as the project funds / treasury.
Out of that $5.8M, a further ~$2.16M in total “salary” was paid to the 5–6 founders in the first half of 2022, on top of the $2.48M each they paid themselves in the days after the IDO (see Part 4 for more detail). This includes a final salary-like payment of 5 lots of $120,000 each on June 6th, 2022, 1 day before the draft Lummis-Gillibrand crypto bill and the centralized core team decision to abandon DBLP delivery per the roadmap.
At the end of Q2 2022, the roadmap delivery date for the DBLP, our best estimation of funds held in identifiable Basis Markets wallets, were ~$450k in solana defi wallets, and somewhere between $0 and $1.419M in CEX accounts at FTX (over which we have no visibility). Our best estimate of aggregated “burn rate” is that across the 201 days from token IDO on Dec 11th, 2021 through to June 30, 2022, they had been expending $19–$20k per day, at an aggregate burn-rate of ~$7M per year. This burn rate has reduced substantially since end of Q2 2022, as it appears they stopped paying themselves salaries. It is noted that the majority of remaining funds appear to have been in FTX rather than defi wallets leading into the FTX collapse in November.
At the end of this blockchain analysis, it is estimated that at least $24M of the raised capital of around $28M has been distributed to founders, leaving very little funds to support other operating expenses (infrastructure costs, legal fees etc). This part gives us some insight into the likely reasons for why the Basis Markets team has never provided a single piece of financial reporting on the raised capital, and why they never hired those much-vaunted investment bankers and top tier blockchain devs.
Get a coffee and settle in for all the detail.
Introduction
Welcome to Part 5 of our series on the investigation into Basis Markets. In Part 3 we outlined how the NFT capital raise of 32,000 SOL was distributed. In Part 4 we outlined how the $20.725M USDC raised was distributed, with $2.48M being sent to each of the 6 founders.
This Part 5 seeks to answer 2 of the questions that we were asked to investigate, which were:
- what happened to the $5.8M that went into operating funds, after the 6 founders paid themselves $2.48M each?
- in the absence of financial reporting, is it possible to estimate cash burn rates and total cash balance at end of Q2 2022?
This part will attempt to answer the above questions. We might start by listing the main wallets that Basis Markets have used frequently for managing the ‘treasury’ or operating funds. Below is a table with the top 10 wallets, of which 9 are Solana Defi wallets, and 1 is a CEX wallet, being FTX. Obviously, we have zero visibility on this FTX accounts, or multiple FTX accounts as the case may be. It is entirely possible that initial transfers from Basis Markets Defi wallets to FTX were sent to personal FTX accounts as opposed to a Basis Markets KYC’d Business account. In the absence of ANY financial reporting, it remains possible that there has never been a KYC’d Basis Markets Institutional / Corporate account at FTX or other CEXs.
In the absence of any confirmation from the Basis Markets team, most of the focus will be on the Defi wallets, and what the blockchain tells us about how they used their treasury.
3h8c
The first wallet, 3h8c was used for the NFT capital raise.
This wallet was initialised on September 30th, 2021 by TraderSkew wallet B2AM, depositing 0.08 SOL at 14:55pm (Solscan link below).
6 minutes later, Andreas’s wallet 2mEv sent 0.0000001 SOL to wallet 3h8c (Solscan link below). And thus Founder 1 and Founder 2 jointly kicked off Basis Markets defi wallets.
3h8c collected 32,000 SOL, and has multiple phases of accumulation and distribution of proceeds, with the ‘presale’ raising approximately $6M worth of SOL on 9th November 2021, a day on which SOL topped $250. This presale was supposed to sell 1000 NFTs, but rather than stopping at 1000, the team decided to just keep selling NFTs. After the follow-on public sale concluded on Nov 15th, there was a slow trickle of ‘refunds’.
Then over the course of 17th November 2021 to closure on the 11th December 2021, this 3h8c wallet was primarily used to farm SRM tokens, ATLAS tokens and ALEPH tokens. The funds used for this farming came from the SOL royalties from Solsea / Magic Eden NFTs sales, with SOL transferred into wallet J4wc, usually swapped straight away into USDC, then used to farm SRM / ALEPH / ATLAS. 3h8c has a total of 1,520 solana transactions, of which three quarters relate to the NFT IDO, and the last quarter relate to degen leveraged yield farming of ‘shitcoins’. Great start.
For those interested in seeing the details of the large vertical drops from the above chart, in which 32,000 SOL were distributed to the personal wallets of the 6 founders in a precise 51/20/10/7/7/5 ratio, please feel free to view Part 3, where this is outlined in full.
J4wc
J4wc, as stated above, is a wallet that was primarily used for collecting royalty revenues from sale of NFTs on Solsea and Magic Eden. This wallet has over 25,000 Solana transactions which we have included in our database of transactions, and we usually find that it is usually better to try and describe the behaviour of the wallet in aggregate rather than by individual transactions.
Across November and December 2021, royalties from NFT sales were distributed primarily to Basis wallet 3h8c (1,709 SOL) and used for farming ATLAS / ALEPH and SRM leading into the $BASIS token IDO.
A further ~230 SOL also distributed to TraderSkew’s 8eDH and B2AM wallets. At the bottom of the above graphic, you can see a variety of wallets receiving refunds for ‘missing out’ on the cutoff for NFT purchase during the public sale.
EKYE
This brings us to the token IDO, where $20.725M USDC were raised in a dutch auction. Proceeds were collected in wallet EKYE, with timecourse of deposits depicted below by TraderSkew as posted on Twitter link below (now deleted).
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20211212171834/https://twitter.com/TraderSkew/status/1470078070929469446
This wallet was also used for claiming of $BASIS tokens at the end of the IDO (initial DEX offering). This wallet has over 15,000 Solana transactions on the blockchain and imported into our database.
SAjoy
SAjo is the Mint wallet for Basis tokens.
At the bottom of the screenshot below from the SAjoy wallet, you can see the $20.725M USDC IDO proceeds leaving the wallet. We have already outlined what happened to that $20.7M in Part 4, and Part 6 will focus in on those Founder “locked” tokens.
Source: https://solscan.io/account/SAjoyXis817WHiaGRG37W1aKb2HArT99JfSTKmnZEL2
Immediately above that $20.7M USDC, you can see 50M Basis tokens being transferred out. This is TraderSkew’s 50% token allocation from his NFTs (500 NFTs held, 10 NFTs transferred to Mystery Founder 7).
Next is CryptoBoole’s 7M tokens (7%), then TedTalksMacro’s 7M tokens (7%), then our Mystery Founder’s 1M tokens (1%), then Andreas’s 20M tokens (20%), then DeltaOneDennis’s 10M tokens (10%), and finally Comguito’s 5M tokens (5%).
But before the token IDO was completed, and before the founder tokens were minted, wallet SAjoy was used to mint 10M Basis tokens to be used for liquidity provision, as per the transaction below.
These 10M $BASIS tokens were sent from SAjo to the 7rrL wallet that will be examined in alot more detail in Part 6. One interesting element here is that the IDO prospectus when discussing the tokenomics specifically identified that 5M (not 10M) tokens would be used for “seed liquidity” provision.
Given the fixed maximum supply of 1B tokens, those errant additional 5M tokens have to come from somewhere else, right? Don’t worry, we’ll get to that in Part 6.
SAjoy was also used for minting the tokens that were sent to Orca to initiate the “liquidity rewards” from the above tokenomics screenshot, and also for the first rounds of airdrops to NFT holders after the token IDO. When the airdrops were sent out, it was not known that the founders had received their “locked” tokens in full on Day 1, while NFT holders had their tokens distributed over the course of 5 months. SAjoy wallet adds another 6900 Solana transactions to the database.
7rrL
7rrL was used for seed liquidity provision, receiving 10M Basis tokens from SAjoy wallet, and a variety of USDC transfers from a number of Basis Markets wallets, primarily EB5V. This wallet peaks at around $1M USDC in value, and has bursts of activity over the course of the 2 months that it is active. There are multiple rounds of LP deposits and withdrawals over the course of the 2 months, but every day, the USDC balance is inevitably pinned on zero, with USDC either deployed in liquidity provision, or transferred out to other wallets.
This wallet will be examined in much more detail in Part 6, mainly because it is used for many things other than straight seed liquidity provision. As a little preview of Part 6, it appears that this wallet was used to short the Basis token in a leveraged yield farm (LYF) on Tulip at around the IDO price, as well as selling Basis tokens below IDO price. As an example, below is a serum limit sell order for 2,024,767 tokens at 4.66c, a transaction which settled less than a minute later.
As stated, there will be much more discussion of wallet 7rrL in Part 6.
EB5V
And we finally get to the Primary “savings account” for Basis Markets, wallet EB5V.
After distributing $2.48M to each of the 6 founders, what was left was $5.801M USDT that some DAO members consider to be the ‘treasury’ while the team might prefer to describe as ‘operating funds’.
On the night of the $BASIS IDO, $20.725M USDC went from a Basis Markets wallet into FTX.
At 20:30pm on the 11th of December, $20.725M USDC went into FTX.
At 22:04pm on the 11th of December, $5.801M USDT came out of FTX into a TraderSkew wallet (8eDH).
At 22:08pm on the 11th of December, $5.801M USDT was sent from TraderSkew.sol wallet 8eDH to the new Basis Markets “savings account” (EB5V), as per the Solscan transaction link below.
EB5V received $5.801M USDT, so at the beginning, 100% of its USD equivalents were in the form of Tether, which is hardly used on Solana. At the left of the below chart, you can see 5.8M in green colored USDT. The amount drops immediately by 2.4839M as they are sent to cryptoboole’s 2yEY wallet, and then later returned as it appears he got paid $2.48M twice and they forgot to pay DeltaOneDennis, which gets rectified on Dec 13th. For more detail, see Part 4. After return of the 2.48M from cryptoboole’s 2yEY wallet, there are a variety of serum limit sell orders to swap USDT for USDC which only get partial fills, so they switch to using market orders. Some of the swapped USDC are sent to 7rrL for seed liquidity provision. This gets the wallet balance down to around 3M USDT and 1.7M USDC, at which point there is a rotating series of stable farms entered, both USDT and USDC stablecoin farms. USDT and USDC are deposited with Tulip, Francium, Saber and other platforms, being swapped for tuUSDT, wpUSDT, ab-USDT, af-DAI, wb-BUSD, tu-USDC, ac-USD, CASH-USDC, wp-USDC and ae-USDC. They are all eventually converted back to USDC or USDT, and any remaining USDT is swapped for USDC. By the end of the period, all funds in the “savings account” are in USDC.
Looking at it by transaction it appears very confusing. But when examined on a day by day basis, it is pretty clear that there are really only a handful of days when all of the swapping in and out occurs, and what started as USDT has been successfully rotated through various stable farms and ending in USDC, where it sits earning no income for the last month or so of its life in EB5V.
Do you want to know what the estimated income was for the EB5V Basis Markets “savings account”? They earned <$10k in income across the 6 or so weeks they were farming stables before they let the savings account sit in USDC. To put it in perspective, if you look at the chart above, you can see a step down on 4th January (the pink angled line at the top), and this represents the team paying themselves salary of 25k to each of the 6 founders. Likewise, at the very far right there is a larger step down, and this reflects money being transferred out to the ‘payroll’ wallets, on 24th February, when the 6 founders paid themselves $110.5k USDC each.
But then we get to the far right, and we see an absolute cliff, where the balance drops from $3.7M to 0. What happened there? All funds were secured and transferred immediately to the DLAB wallet, which was the primary wallet for the TraderSkew.com website (now deleted).
From DLAB, the $3.7M are secured and sent to FTX. The question becomes why did the Basis Markets savings account get emptied urgently on March 1st? Because Andreas, Founder number 2, apparently just upped and left.
On March 8th, the Basis team put out an announcement in the NFT owners channel of the discord about Andreas having departed some time over the course of the prior week.
The timeline as we see it is:
- February 24th — founders each get paid $110.5k salary.
- Andreas likely does his disappearing trick between Feb 24 and March 1
- March 1st — secure $3.7M — EB5V to FTX via TraderSkew’s DLAB wallet
- March 3rd — $3.7M returned to new EdCt wallet via TraderSkew’s 8iKY and 2 burner wallets
- March 8th — Team belatedly announces Andreas departure to DAO
After announcement, there were multiple discussions about legal action being taken by the core team against Andreas. 15 months later, there has been no update. As stated in the announcement, the team were all internally doxxed to each other. TraderSkew appears to have sent a direct message to Andreas with an implied threat.
The prior history is interesting here, as TraderSkew was Founder number 1 receiving 50% of founder locked tokens, and Andreas as Founder number 2 received 20% of founder locked tokens. TraderSkew B2AM wallet initiated wallet 3h8c, followed 6 minutes later by Andreas’s 2mEv wallet. Prior to that, Andreas had been engaged by TraderSkew as a developer for at least 3 different projects.
The screenshot below is from a Wayback Machine archived copy of Andreas’s software development company website, outlining some of the projects that he had worked on. Two of those projects were Macrohedged.com and TraderSkew.com, as per the below descriptions, with Macrohedged.com being a 2018–2020 timeframe project, followed by Traderskew.com in 2020–2021. The third project listed on that project page was VIPsub.app, which was another collaboration between TraderSkew and Andreas.
We find it interesting that the TraderSkew.com website was able to be viewed for 6 months after Andreas’s disappearance.
Our legal team find it difficult to believe that after 3 years of working together, TraderSkew did not have a mechanism to reliably contact Andreas, or Basis Markets have a mechanism with which to serve legal papers for supposed breach of contract. There have been no updates from the team on success or failure of supposed legal proceedings against Andreas.
One community member has informed us that they have had recent direct message discussions with Andreas. We have their consent to show the private correspondence, but do not have Andreas’s consent, so these communications are not able to be shared on Medium. It is interesting that Andreas’s software development company website has been taken down since that discussion with a community member, just like MacroHedged.com and Traderskew.com.
The private communications have been provided to regulatory authorities.
Enough of that, time to get back to blockchain evidence.
EdCt — “savings account” AFTER Andreas left
$3.7M is ‘secured’ from ‘savings account’ EB5V to TraderSkew.com wallet DLAB, which is quite possibly a wallet that Andreas may have had access to during involvement in setting up the “full automation for monetizing on Twitter followers” work for TraderSkew.com. The $3.7M goes into FTX 2 minutes later and stays there for 24 hours or so.
The $3.7M then comes back out to another TraderSkew personal wallet (8iKY) at 15:50pm on the 2nd of March, which is 8 minutes after the final LP withdrawal of liquidity in wallet 7rrL (liquidity provision wallet) and 6 minutes before the final closing of 7rrL. It seems that whoever was moving the $3.7M through Traderskew’s 8iKY wallet was also closing down the liquidity provision wallet. The $3.7M then gets sent through 2 burner wallets over the next 24 hours before going back to FTX at 14:23pm on March 3rd, and coming back out yet again 21 minutes later to the freshly initialised EdCt ‘savings account’ wallet.
In the meantime, the FTX account also initialises x95A, which will become the new ‘payroll account’ wallet for miscellaneous transactions and paying out salaries.
EdCt received $3.7M USDC on March 3rd, and then does not much with it for 12 days. There is no stablecoin farming in this wallet.
On March 15th, $1.5M get sent back to FTX via an intermediary wallet. So far, we have only been able to trace $100k worth of this $1.5M USDC coming back out of FTX. At 14:50pm on the 15th, $1.5M USDC went into FTX, and 4 minutes later 100k came back out to the TraderSkew.sol 8eDH wallet, waiting 24 hours to send 50k of it to the TraderSkew.com DLAB wallet and then 2 minutes later back into FTX. As always, ownership of the FTX wallets in question is unknowable without subpoena power.
Through late March through to the start of June, USDC and SOL are transferred out to other Basis wallets for a variety of purposes, including paying salaries as well as transferring out to FTX. These transfers to FTX have been given the benefit of the doubt, and considered still to be Basis Markets funds, even in instances where they are transferred through chains of wallets known to be founder wallets.
The large spike in the middle of that graph above is the receipt from FTX of $750k USDC to EdCt, before being passed to x95A wallet to enable the final salary payment to $120k each to the remaining 5 founders on June 6th. As of the end of Q2, 2022, the balance of the EdCt ‘savings account’ was exactly $400k USDC.
5Raj — ‘payroll account’ before Andreas left
5Raj was kind of a transaction account wallet that keeps standing balance below 50k most of the time, taking large periodic influxes of USDC roughly every month or so, and then distributes it all in a few hours to a number of identifiable wallets associated with founders.
Above is the USDC balance from December 19 through to March 1st, the day that all the Basis Markets wallets were shut down as a response to Andreas leaving. Below is a token flow map of how the last round of salary payments of 110.5k USDC on Feb 24th were distributed. 110.5k went to each of the 6 founders (TraderSkew got some extra payments), with funds being further distributed to FTX by 5 of the 6, and DeltaOneDennis stable farming his $110.5k on Francium.
There remains a small possibility that these 6 payments of 110.5k each were routed through 6 personal wallets and then on to the Basis Markets corporate FTX wallet (assuming that such a KYC corporate wallet exists). However, we believe it is entirely reasonable to interpret the pattern of 6 identical payments going to founder wallets on a roughly month basis as being much more likely to be payroll-type payments.
x95A — transaction and ‘payroll account’
After Andreas left and funds were consolidated in FTX and then sent back out to EdCt, as above, we have noted that x95A (the new “payroll account”) was initiated from FTX within 15 minutes of EdCt (the new “savings account”). Same story, different wallet. This time however, there were only 5 founders to pay, not 6. The first payment on March 27th was split across 2 wallets. Non-founder team members (Grayfox 10k, AndyMacK 2.5k, and community mods 0.5k) were still paid from x95A on the 27th March, however for this instance, 3 of the founder payments came from EdCt wallet rather than x95A. For the subsequent salary payments on May 12 and then final one of June 6–7th, the amounts were increased to 90k times 5 and then 120k times 5, and all paid out of x95A (as shown below).
For those interested in examining the evidence for yourself, the above table has all of the “salary” payments made to the 6 founders before March 1st, and then to the remaining 5 founders after Andreas left.
As stated previously, the last “salary” payments we have been able to find in defi wallets was on June 6–7th, with DeltaOneDennis appearing to get the lucky last salary paymet from Basis Markets defi wallets on the same day that the draft Lummis-Gillibrand bill was released to the public.
As of the end of June, there really were only 2 defi wallets still in use at Basis Markets, EdCt and x95A. As of end of Q2, 2022, they had 400k and 50.531k respectively.
FTX
The balances of funds on FTX as the primary CEX used by Basis Markets in 2021–2022 are obviously not available to examine. Our assumptions whilst undertaking this particular piece of investigation have been that all funds going from Basis Markets defi wallets to FTX are assumed to have gone to a corporate KYC account under the name of Basis Markets, not to individual accounts. Beyond the large $1.5M transfer on March 15th, we have identified a little over $1M in additional funds sent from the above Basis Markets defi wallets to FTX. It is noted that a significant proportion of those funds were sent via TraderSkew wallets 8eDH (TraderSkew.sol) and DLAB (TraderSkew.com). For the purpose of this analysis, funds routed via TraderSkew wallets have been assumed to have arrived successfully into a Basis Markets corporate account at FTX, not diverted to TraderSkew’s personal FTX account.
Basis Markets wallet value over time
Having examined each of these wallets in detail, now lets combine them all to see our aggregate estimated view of the balance of Basis Markets wallets from NFT raise all the way through to the end of Q2 2022, when the DBLP was supposed to have been delivered.
At far left, we can see ~$6M worth of SOL coming into 3h8c wallet for the NFT capital raise, followed by additional SOL with the public sale. There is then a gap for a few weeks when not alot happens, but we know reflects NFT sale royalties coming into J4wc and being swept daily into 3h8c to do some degen farming of so-called ‘shitcoins’.
Then in green we get raised capital for the $BASIS IDO into wallet EKYE (scale should go up to $20.725M, but we will leave that to your imagination). $20.725M USDC goes to FTX and then comes back out again as USDT, with 5.8M going into EB5V, the “savings account” wallet. Some funds start getting moved from EB5V into 7rrL to allow for seed liquidity provision, as well as to FTX, and some goes to 5Raj to enable the first round of salary payments to founders (and community moderators). The remaining 4M or so gets washed through various stablecoin farms to change it from USDT to USDC (and earn a very little yield along the way). And then EVERYTHING gets pulled into FTX from defi land on March 1st as Andreas supposedly disappears.
After Andreas, $3.7M comes back out of FTX, gets cycled through TraderSkew wallets then back into FTX, only to come back out again to a fresh new ‘savings’ wallet EdCt, and a fresh new ‘payroll’ wallet x95A. $1.5M goes back into FTX on March 15th from EdCt, and as yet, where this $1.5M went has not yet been identified, so it is assumed to have stayed on FTX. After paying out 3 more rounds of ever increasingly sized monthly salaries to the founders (90k each then 120k each), our best estimate is that there were 450k USDC in defi wallets at the end of Q2 2022, and somewhere between $0 and $1.42M on FTX.
Treasury / operational funds vs founder distributions
Let’s zoom all the way back out again and look at the big picture, which means including distributions of raised capital and distribution of ‘salary’ to founders.
In the below graph, green above the line is Basis Markets treasury or operational funds. Red below the line is distribution to founders. Of the approximately $28M in raised capital, it is our estimation that founders have received at least $24M, with the estimated remaining cash balance at the end of Q2 2022 being less than $2M.
Before the the token IDO, in the letter to owners, the team stated:
“We’ve estimated the funds we’ll need and will be monitoring and budgeting it closely over the coming 5 years”
The evidence presented in Part 3, Part 4 and this Part 5 do not support the idea that funds were budgeted and monitored closely. The goal was to hire a team of top talent to build out an ambitious product. As they stated in their letter to owners:
“It’s not cheap to buy a team of top-tier investment bankers, plus the best blockchain devs, but it will be necessary if we agree that we want to aim for this ambitious vision”
The evidence presented above shows that there were no top-tier investment bankers, nor top tier blockchain devs. Their primary substantive dev hire was Greyfox, and from examining the blockchain evidence, whilst the founders were paying themselves $25k, $30k, $90k, $110.5k and finally $120k per month, identifiable payments to Greyfox wallets were more like $10k per month. This estimation of 10k per month, or 120k per year based on the blockchain evidence appears well short of what the best blockchain devs were commanding in 2021 and start of 2022 ($300k–600k per annum for good Rust Devs). It is of course possible that Greyfox and other non-founder team members were also receiving payments from Basis Markets Corporate FTX accounts in addition to the defi payments. If that is the case, then it seems that our assumption of zero costs on FTX is dangerous, in which case the outstanding balance at Q2 2022 shifts downwards from the estimated maximum at $1.49M and moves towards the $0 lower bound.
What about other CEXs or on-chain activity?
One of the additional questions beyond the original 2 questions from the start of this post that we have been asked to investigate with the on-chain evidence is this:
3 What evidence can you find that Basis Markets were moving money to CEXs other than FTX in preparation for DBLP cross-exchange beta testing?
4 What evidence can you find that Basis Markets were using on-chain automated lending, automated stable farming and automated yield extraction / MEV?
The answer to both questions is that we have found no evidence. Absence of evidence is of course not evidence of absence, however we have found no transfers from any Basis Markets defi wallets to any centralized exchange other than FTX. There were no transfers to Binance, no transfers to ByBit, no transfers to OKex, AscendEX or any of the other CEXs that were supposed to be part of the DBLP cross-exchange hedge fund due for release at the end of Q2 2022. It remains possible that funds were transferred to these CEXs from FTX, and if so, it would not be possible to see that activity. We rate this probability as low. It also remains possible that the $1.5M that went into FTX came back out into a fresh set of defi wallets with no linkages to any of the other existing Basis Markets wallets or founder wallets, and that we are simply not able to find them.
With regards automated lending, automated stable farming and yield extraction, it remains possible that these were developed and tested on Solana devnet, but never tested live on Solana mainnet. All that has ever been provided as proof that they were ever built was a couple of graphs of supposed backtests. We have seen no evidence of high-volume automated farming. The only farming we have identified was manual farming in 3h8c wallet (SRM / ALEPH / ATLAS) for a few weeks in Nov 2021, and then rotation of USDT through stable farms and into USDC in Dec 2021 / Jan 2022. Both of these time periods are well before any DBLP testing was discussed. It remains possible that some DBLP testing was done on mainnet with as-yet unidentified Basis Markets wallets, but it will take better investigators that us to find that evidence.
If you are still reading, respect. That was a huge chunk of blockchain analysis. Rest assured that the end is in sight. We have just one more big blockchain analysis piece to come, Part 6. Part 6 will focus in detail on liquidity provision in wallet 7rrL and how those 10M tokens and 1M USDC were used, and do a deep dive into what happened to the 100M “locked” tokens that were distributed in full on day 0, December 11, 2021. You remember, the ones that were not allowed to be sold until at least December 2022?
Spoiler alert: Andreas sold his 20M locked tokens.
The question is, did any of the other founders sell their tokens as well? Until next time………
Crypto Sleuth Investigations
If you have a crypto project that you want a team to dedicate some blood sweat and tears doing a proper investigation, reach out on Twitter and we can discuss your situation.
Basis Markets Investigation Series
Part 2 — Digital Property Inventory — what has been deleted???
Part 3 — Blockchain — NFT presale — how was 32,000 SOL split?
Part 4 — Blockchain — $BASIS IDO — how was $20.725M split?
Part 5 — Blockchain — What happened to the Basis bank account?
Part 6 — Blockchain — Seed Liquidity and Founder Locked Tokens
Part 7 — Regulation — were NFT/tokens “investment contracts”?
Part 8 — Regulation — was Basis Markets an “investment adviser”?
Part 9 — Regulation — did Basis Markets break “number 1 rule?”
Part 10 — Regulation — what did Lummis/Gillibrand change?
Part 11 — Founders — TraderSkew
Part 12 — Founders — CryptoBoole
Part 13 — Founders — Andreas / TedTalksMacro
Part 14 — Founders — DeltaOneDennis / Comguito
Part 15 — Conclusion
