Why I’ve put a few ETH into Shuffle

10 min readSep 25, 2019

I would firstly like to state that this is not going to be a low-quality shill post about ‘just another new deflationary token’. You might have heard about BOMB and a few dozens of other deflationary tokens that have popped up lately, some of which have exhibited broken code to a certain degree. But I think I have found something really interesting here in this emerging space, and I will tell you exactly why I think it’s interesting with as little sugar coating as possible.

People have been hyped about Bitcoin for years because it is the first truly limited money with no central party being able to dictate its rate of inflation as per their whim. Since the advent of smart contracts through Ethereum, we can now go a step further and not only generate a form of digital currency that remains ungoverned by any central party, but can generate tokenized monetary protocol that is innately deflationary, by hard-coding its contract with the condition that the supply gradually deflates with every movement of the token.

The first solid implementation of this was BOMB.

It’s a simple Ethereum-based token with a burning component:

every transaction from person X to person Y burns 1% of the transaction value

If you send 200 BOMB, then 2 BOMB out of that amount will be destroyed forever. Simple.

1% is not that high of a ‘fee’, so the user won’t lose a fortune. Over time however, as utility rises, the supply would get getting reduced drastically, maybe even resulting in exponentially decreasing supply and therefore, massively raising the value of a single token. We have seen this experiment getting very popular in only a few weeks with the price starting at sub 10 cents, going all the way up to 14$ in a matter of weeks.

Etherscan even started a new category for this sort of a token: Deflationary Tokens

There is one condition that none of these people who bought into these tokens see: there is no damn incentive to use the token. It has no real utility and every new guy participating would only buy-in and hold the tokens forever, not doing anything with it and just waiting for more people buying in after them to raise the price. This is the same flaw that will make them collapse just like the POW3D coin, for example, which you might have heard about before. Inactivity will occur at some point and there is nothing you can do about it. You are 100% dependent on new buyers here.

The activity and price of BOMB and other deflationary tokens have been going down for weeks already. I would say that this makes them pretty much dead in the water. Yes, sub 1000$ trading volume is dead and this dumping cycle was destined to happen. No, this is not ‘normal consolidation’ and this is not the same as other altcoins going down. BOMB is down 90% since ATH in June just 3 months ago. From 14$ to 1.50$. No other coin in the top 500 has performed that badly. Things are looking extremely bearish, for good reason, for these deflationary tokens.

BOMB had a short and aggressive hype phase because the idea of a deflationary currency is actually interesting and new. But there is something missing and I will now tell you what that is.

Make. People. Move. Their. Tokens

And I can’t push enough how brilliant yet simple the mechanic that Agustin from Shuffle Monster (or Shuffle for short) came up with is.

You can buy into Shuffle with like 100$ and you’d be (as of September 24th 2019) in the top 512, the ‘heap’, getting a 10% ROI in 40 days on average because of their 1% redistribution mechanic. Shuffle is the only coin that redistributes 1% of a tx randomly to one person of the top 512 holders, in addition to the traditional 1% burn mechanic. This is the huge game-changer deflationary tokens needed — ‘Redistribution to the top 512’.

Look, if I want to make the most money with the least amount of money, I would pay whatever amount of $ to get just enough SHUF tokens to be in the heap, or the top 512. (or rather the top 450 or 400 so as to not be kicked out by other buyers for a while). At the moment this is somewhere at around 80$ or 590 SHUF. On average, you can gain 59 SHUF tokens in about 40 days. That’s +10% profit or ROI in a bit over a month. Now buy yourself in with 5 positions 80$ each to have 5 spots in the top 512, the heap. You have 10% ROI for your 5x80$ investment in a matter of weeks and.. here comes the mechanic, the other person who got kicked out by you buying in, will have to buy a bit more SHUF to be inside the heap again, or send a few tokens from another wallet, just enough to be inside the heap, to receive the high ROI again. Having the distribution of 1% assigned to another single person in the heap, randomly for every single transaction, creates such an interesting game mechanic and an incentive to buy and move tokens. All. The. Time.

It has essentially created a game on its own. A fight for the highest ROI spot, which is as close to 512 as possible, but as far away as possible, so you don’t get kicked out early. There is a constant flow of transactions from people splitting up their wallets into smaller portions, closer to the heap, and people putting together SHUF amounts from different wallets to reenter the heap. This is the only coin with a constant incentive for people to move coins around based on the current sweet spot for the highest ROI.

So I was looking into it — who developed it, how was it distributed, how much do the founders hold, etc. — When I’m interested in a project I look deeply into it.. and boy, was I surprised.

About the Distribution

Let me start with telling you that with BOMB, you are holding a coin where the founders have access to over 20% of the supply, potentially more. Yep. Fuck that. It’s way too much in my opinion and just shows their greed. BOMB and most other deflationary coins had their distribution via telegram. You had to fill out forms and verify yourself with your phone number, email ID and telegram ID. Sounds good on paper. But in the end, they had a list of people and their wallets and manually distributed to them. They could have made 1000 entries of non-existing people with different wallets they have access to and distribute the supply to them with no one possibly knowing. And with that, they’d potentially have access to even more than the 20% in the first place. I am just stating the likelihood of such a malicious act here. This is not an accusation. However, the fact that the BOMB founders came up and said “just look at our wallets, we are not dumping” when the price continued to dump is a dumb excuse and makes it seem pretty suspicious. They simply can’t prove to not have fucked around in the distribution phase. People have to trust them blindly. And having to trust someone in crypto will always end terribly.

How did Shuffle distribute their supply then?

Shuffle, for example, distributed the tokens to Ethereum holders at a block height from the past, 10 days before the announcement for launching Shuffle was even made. Every wallet holding ETH at block 8113050 received 150 SHUF per Ethereum, with a maximum of 1500 SHUF for 10 ETH. Since the block height chosen for distribution was in the past (clever again, Agustin), no one could’ve split up their ETH holdings to get more than 1500 Shuffle. For example, someone with 300 ETH would probably have split up his ETH into 30 wallets, receiving 30x1500 SHUF. Also, and this was very important to me — neither did the founder nor did any other wallet split up their ETH holdings in advance. This is verifiable and I did my due diligence. A few weeks ago I sat down for 12 hours autistically rummaging through every past transaction above a few hundred SHUF, where it came from, how many ETH the source wallet held, and if the ETH amount was coming from another wallet weeks or months before the block height. Nothing. Not for a single wallet. This is how distribute should be done. Good job, Agustin.

The founder Agustin holds around 5% of the supply at present, which is fine and small enough in my opinion. His wallet is the top 1 wallet with 50k Shuffle. He didn’t even split it up to receive more tokens by the 1% redistributions, which is an honorable move in my opinion. Every other wallet is a non-team-wallet. And notice how well distributed it is:

About the founder

Agustin is not an anonymous nobody who’s new to the crypto space. In fact, he has been involved in the DLT space for a good while already, having launched Ripio Credit Network, a solid crypto lending platform and top 130 coin, which is listed on Binance and working in tandem with Decentraland. Not my type of project to invest in personally, but that doesn’t matter. He is definitely someone more professional than you expect for ‘another BOMB clone’. I’m happy with how he took the time and answer all of my ‘FUD-questions’… and this was literally hours of his time. He had no problems or hesitation giving me any info about his holdings, how the distribution worked and what happened with various high-value transactions. This is crypto. You can verify everything, and it’s beautiful.

Another, smaller selling point I see for Shuffle is the fact that you have to keep your tokens off-exchange to receive the redistribution. This is not given with any other deflationary token. Every other token can be bought on exchange and as seen with BOMB, the biggest percentage of people that buy on centralized exchanges keep their holdings on exchanges. Why withdraw them at all? There is no incentive to do so. You would end up needlessly burning 1% of your stack. With Shuffle, there is an incentive to remain in the heap and for that, your tokens would have to be in your own Ethereum wallet. You could buy SHUF on an exchange and always send them to your own wallet for the highest ROI. This will drain the supply (as fewer coins will be available on exchanges) and push the price up even more. Also, withdrawal of SHUF from exchanges will create a burn that rarely occurs for BOMB and the others.

By the way, the code for Shuffle was audited by a main developer from Decentraland. I am still hoping to see a public audit in the future, but this is more than enough for me at the moment. The only gripe I have with Shuffle at the moment is with their website. It literally just looks unappealing, sorry.

What kind of profit is possible with Shuffle?

BOMB reached a market cap of $13,000,000 at peak, which is still small for a true decentralized deflationary currency in my opinion. It might see another cycle bringing it upwards of 20$ a coin and a market cap of over $20,000,000 with the upcoming bull market.

BOMB’s chart to its peak at $14.

Comparing this chart to that of Shuffle is hardly possible since the current price and market cap of Shuffle would not even be on the image here. The lowest price and market cap of BOMB, all the way to the left, was at $0.70 with a cap of around 672,000 $. That was more than 4x the current price of Shuffle.

I bet that Shuffle will overtake BOMB’s and lead the way of deflationary tokens here, based on the fact that it’s the only token with a true and ongoing incentive of moving tokens around, hunting the highest ROI spots and having permanently real activity. 10% per 40 days or over 135% a year truly sounds fomo-ish. This will easily generate a lot of hype as people begin understanding the mechanic. It’s a lot better distributed, the founder doesn’t hold 20% or more and there is a long way to the upside until BOMB’s market cap for comparison is hit. If Shuffle were to reach the peak market capitalization of BOMB, we would earn about a profit of x98 from here. Here is the math. Current market cap of 132,000 for Shuffle, to peak marketcap of BOMB. +9748%, or an x98.

100$ invested would end up being worth 10,000$. SHUF, the fundamentally better token, with more upside potential. That’s my bet. Even a rise to only 1$ instead of 14$ would be an increase of x7, or +669%. That’s more than enough for me to buy in.

So yeah, that’s it. → Buy Shuffle. It’s available on Uniswap: https://uniswap.exchange/swap/0x3a9fff453d50d4ac52a6890647b823379ba36b9e