Basis Markets Investigation — Part 2 - Digital Property Inventory

7 min readMay 27, 2023

Crypto Sleuth Investigations was engaged in March 2023 to look into the activities and behaviours of a crypto project called Basis Markets. By the time we were asked to look into Basis, they were almost 18 months into their journey as a project. One of the first things we do with any new investigation is secure as much of the available evidence as possible. It’s pretty easy with the blockchain, given it is fixed and immutable, but much more difficult with all the ancillary evidence that a project like this collects over time.

We did an inventory of their digital properties. We were very surprised by what we found. It looked very much like a moderately concerted effort to scrub as much of the project history as possible, while still giving the appearance of being an active project.

The key period appears to be November / December 2021, during which time the project raised around $28M USD in capital from investors.

During this time, the Basis team responsible for marketing put out:

4 Medium articles. All have been deleted.
6 YouTube videos. All have been deleted.
2 Prospectus documents (PDF). Deleted from Discord.
1 “Letter to the Owners”. Deleted from Discord.
1 Project Roadmap. Deleted from the Basis.markets website.

As investigators, this kind of pattern seems a little suspicious, reminding us of the quote from Steven Wright: “If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”

Over the coming weeks, we are going to see what we can recover from the deleted pieces of potential evidence, and see what it tells us about just how closely Basis Markets has adhered to their (now deleted) roadmap, and adhered to the commitments made to investors in their launch prospectus entitled: “DAO Proposal 1 — Unlocking growth with the BASIS token”. You see, the team at Basis Markets sold themselves as experienced business people, with >80 years of combined experience, coming from the TradFi world where a 30 page prospectus to raise $20M might be considered insufficient.

And this is what the full prospectus looked like for their token offering, before it got deleted from Basis Markets Discord.

BASIS MARKETS - DAO_proposal_1_-_The_BASIS_Token.pdf

DAO PROPOSAL #1: Unlocking growth with the BASIS token 1 DAO PROPOSAL #1: Unlocking growth with the BASIS token 1. The…

www.slideshare.net

We’re going to have alot more discussion of this Prospectus, and what it tells us about the “behemoth” that Basis were looking to build. But that is enough for now.

But before they could get to building the behemoth, they needed to convince “Equity NFT owners” to vote in favour of a second capital raise through an Initial DEX Offering (IDO), so they could scale the team.

As they say in the letter: “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”

BASIS MARKETS - Letter_to_the_Owners-28th_Nov.pdf

Letter to the owners - 28th November 2021 Owners of basis.markets, Firstly, all the founders want to thank you for…

www.slideshare.net

Below is just a quick tour through the highlights of the Basis Markets Digital Property Inventory. We’ll have much more detail in the next few installments.

Basis Markets Digital Property Inventory

Medium — https://medium.com/@basismarkets 404 Error. Hmmm

YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/@basismarkets/videos 6 videos available. First one March 2022, last one in May 2022. Hmmm, a little dead.

Twitter — https://twitter.com/basismarkets 400 or so tweets. Pretty inactive. No posts before Oct 2022. Hmmm

Discord — discord.gg/basismarkets Link from Basis Markets Twitter was (and remains) invalid. Hmmm

Basis.markets website — https://basis.markets — placeholder site with some fancy graphics. Link to Basis Blog

Basis Blog — https://blog.basis.markets First blog May 2022, Last entry Jan 2023, looking ahead to 2023 with recap of 2022. Interesting article on how to avoid getting scammed in Crypto.

Basis Docs (gitbook) — https://basis-markets.gitbook.io/welcome-to-gitbook/ Last modified Jan 2023. Seems like a very lightweight ‘whitepaper’.

Principals:

TraderSkew: Joined 2010 https://twitter.com/TraderSkew — 40k followers. Auto-deletes all tweets weekly. No mention of Basis Markets in Bio. Twitter account deleted or twitter name deactivated in April 2023.

TedTalksMacro: Joined Sept 2020. https://twitter.com/TedTalksMacro — ~100k followers. No mention of Basis Markets in Bio. Links to Youtube channel. Active.

CryptoBoole: Joined Dec 2020 https://twitter.com/cryptoboole 9k followers.

TedTalksMacro YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@tedtaIksmacro 12k subscribers. 20 videos. 3 videos in May 2022, big gap to Jan 2023, then started posting more regularly, starting with first video back in Jan 2023 shilling new project capital raise Lambda Markets.

TraderSkew Website: https://www.traderskew.com Website dead (not addressable).

MacroHedged Website: https://www.macrohedged.com Website dead (not addressable.

So, big picture, lots of digital properties with not much activity to give the appearance of an active project. And importantly, almost no activity across any of their digital properties from before May-June 2022, certainly nothing from around the time they launched Basis Markets in November-December 2021.

The question becomes, what was there before May 2022, and what can it tell us about what might have been deleted in an apparent attempt to scrub the internet.

History of important Basis Markets ‘marketing’ publications.

Let’s start with the Basis Markets on the Basis.Markets website. This has been deleted. https://basis.markets/roadmap

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20211113165647/https://basis.markets/roadmap

The first kickoff announcement for Basis Markets appears to have been a Medium post from November 1, 2021, followed by additional Medium blog posts on November 7 (NFT presale), November 11 (NFT public sale) and December 1, 2021 (Basis Token IDO). And in between those Medium articles, there were a series of YouTube video streams.

Nov 1, 2021 — Medium — Introducing Basis Markets

https://basismarkets.medium.com/introducing-basis-markets-b4c82265ca82

Backup:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220619030103/https://basismarkets.medium.com/introducing-basis-markets-b4c82265ca82?source=user_profile---------1----------------------------

Nov 7, 2021 — Medium — NFT-omics and membership model

https://basismarkets.medium.com/nft-onomics-membership-model-ea9b44a5ad9d

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20220706092310/https://basismarkets.medium.com/nft-onomics-membership-model-ea9b44a5ad9d?source=user_profile---------4----------------------------

Nov 8, 2021 — YouTube — Big Yields with Zero Directional Risk! — Townhall 1

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VePdvsaEpfw

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20211105182020/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VePdvsaEpfw

Nov 10, 2021 — YouTube — BASIS MARKETS YIELDING NFT LAUNCH — EARLY ACCESS!! — Townhall 2

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6Co1GiGLMs&t=395s

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20220908022705/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6Co1GiGLMs&gl=US&hl=en

November 11, 2021 — Medium — NFT presale and upcoming NFT launch (seed round) — Deleted

https://basismarkets.medium.com/presale-upcoming-public-launch-1ae2722152e1

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20220706095225/https://basismarkets.medium.com/presale-upcoming-public-launch-1ae2722152e1?source=user_profile---------3----------------------------

Nov 27, 2021 — Discord — Basis token prospectus — DAO Proposal v1.0

https://discord.com/channels/892400914579750973/902936506585452574/914226813193056277

November 27, 2021 — YouTube — Basis Token prospectus presentation

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZypwNo9Zuk

Backup https://web.archive.org/web/20230123175743/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZypwNo9Zuk

November 28, 2021 — Discord — Letter to the Owners — Deleted

https://discord.com/channels/892400914579750973/902936506585452574/914601013724467300

November 29, 2021 — Discord — Basis Token prospectus FAQ — DAO Proposal v1.2 — fixed #slide16

https://discord.com/channels/892400914579750973/902936506585452574/914605347052879962

November 29, 2021 — YouTube — Basis Token community AMA — DAO proposal v1.2

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Zr6m1rJRo

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20230123180115/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6Zr6m1rJRo

December 1st 2021 — Medium

https://basismarkets.medium.com/the-basis-token-launch-12ba27d3438b

Backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20211202003829/https://basismarkets.medium.com/the-basis-token-launch-12ba27d3438b

Dec 14, 2021 — YouTube — NFT Holder Q&A private stream — Token IDO recap

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpNGBSoUlE

And, let’s not forget the last big piece of deleted evidence, TraderSkew’s Twitter feed. This particular Twitter feed has appeared in the Wayback Machine 30 times between March 2020 and March 2023. The last time it was archived was the day that TraderSkew came out of “protected mode” hibernation to pitch the next big “play” for 2023, on-chain gambling, as you can see from the most recent archive below.

TraderSkew (@TraderSkew) / Twitter

Nothing said here is advice of any kind, DYOR.

web.archive.org

But enough of that. The next article will look a little more closely at what Basis Markets actually aimed to achieve, what they promised to investors in their Prospectus, and how they have gone in delivering against that Prospectus. And maybe give some hints as to why all of this material has been deleted………

Crypto Sleuth Investigations

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