Populous World is Selling Its Tokens: A Call for Transparency

Populous World is a blockchain based invoice financing platform designed for peer-to-peer invoice financing on a global scale. Founded by Steve “Nico” Williams, the project raised over $10.2 million USD in their 2017 ICO.

Within the past 30 days, nearly 500,000 PPT has been sent to Binance from Populous controlled wallets. Below, I will highlight the movements from wallet to wallet and provide my analysis on why this I find it alarming.

• Jan 9 2019: 2,000,000 PPT are moved from Steve “Nico” Williams wallet to the the address 0x706d9ac3505d9517719c5e8d0d64af42a731aacb
• Mar 18 2019: 300,000 PPT are moved from the above address to 0xef4566fa76ec4bc7ccefaf23d3ea682145609c38. After some moving around 13,000 PPT end up in wallet 0x1ac963003b29fcdca2d5f509e46063eb88b55a27
• April 3 2019: 412,500 PPT are sent to 4 separate wallets (1.65mil PPT total). They are → 0x31269c648d902fa33354e90f45c534335a800409, 0x18eb2fb31cc787a15e64846e4543a24ee1a5e59b, 0xb70b95f259736cb6491dff848e287ff8ca89789a, and 0x203096000e37c98d5b11c610a13cb4ef69ea161d
• After much maneuvering of tokens, each of the 4 wallets eventually sends various amounts of tokens to the two main wallets in question: 0x1ac963003b29fcdca2d5f509e46063eb88b55a27(listed earlier) and 0xbb1d25edde10cd88e4df7aab8553f3157ef99d7b.
• In total, nearly 500k PPT has been sent from the two wallets to Binance over the past 30 days. These aren’t chunk sell offs, these are gradual pulls of <10k PPT at a time in a very systematic fashion.

Why does this alarm me?

Yesterday, April 27 2019 this issue was raised in their “members only” slack room. As questions began to come in about wallet movements, an incredible ramp up in the offloading of PPT began to take place. In total, ~54k PPT were sent off to Binance on this day.

When the original 2 million was moved from the CEO’s wallet, it was naturally questioned. The response was that these were for the team and that they can do as they wish with them. Nobody questioned this as that seemed plausible at the time.

It has become apparent that this is not the case for two reason:

• Each wallet that the 2 million PPT breaks down into eventually comes into contact with one of the two Binance offloading wallets mentioned above. In fact, the 0x1ac963003b29fcdca2d5f509e46063eb88b55a27 wallet has direct ties with Nico’s wallet based on a 45,000 PPT transaction that took place 170 days ago as seen here.
• XAUp bounties were paid out from these same wallets that the 2 million PPT were sent to. This completely negates the response from the CEO that the wallets were set aside for “team member payouts.”

Given the recent Slack updates about how close things are to firing on all cylinders, this logically seems like the WORST time to sell large amounts of tokens. If things really are close to being ready, why is the team selling now? If their words are true, then it makes absolutely no sense to sell now unless there are financial issues we aren’t privy of.

Is Populous up to no good?

It’s way too early to make any such claims, but the covert and methodical transfer of tokens to several wallets in small amounts on a daily basis followed by the eventual sending to Binance is shady at best.

Repeatedly, investors have been told that Populous has zero financial issues and that they could make “many more platforms” should they want to. Then why are they selling? Do they need the money?

Token holders have been left more or less completely in the dark amidst major platform changes that have taken place these last two quarters. Some highlights of the past 3 months:

• An unreasonably high number of invoices have gone overdue on their payments.
• Less than a handful of new invoices have hit the platform, zero of which have come from new companies.
• A year after its release, the platform is still riddled with bugs, broken links, and buckles under the stress of high traffic.
• Gold Pokens, which were supposed to be the savior for the liquidity pool have been a bust with approximately only 1 dozen being sold. The team has completely abandoned this concept after assuring the community they had investors “lined up.” Now there is something “new” that we once again have zero details about.
• The liquidity pool has been thrown out the window for some black boxed concept that will allow for “infinite scalability.” Details provided to the community: none
• More than 1.5 years after beginning operations, minimum interest rates were announced to be cut all the way down to 1.5%.
• XAUp(gold poken) bounty payouts were weeks late and seemingly only paid once pressure was applied within Slack.

The founding principles of the populous platform have been uprooted. The team continues to pivot over and over again without providing reason or explanation. The promises of soon and “we are building the greatest platform ever” flow in monthly to rile up what few loyal community members remain.

With no invoices, rates being cut, the liquidity pool being uprooted, and now ~1 million dollars worth of PPT being moved to Binance(and in a very strange fashion), it is time for the Populous team to become more transparent about their activities.

Summary

These loyal community members are a large portion of what helped get this project off the ground during the ICO raise. With both the CEO and Secretary of Populous having checkered pasts, one starts to worry when a team goes dark and begins moving tokens(when the price is already extremely low) without providing reasoning.

We have been told “soon” and “this next update is the one” for way too long. It is time to deliver…not just a product, but honesty. Show you have what it takes to be a leader and someone who looks out for those who helped put you in such a position.

This is a call for transparency regarding both the recent PPT movements to binance as well as the final end of year financial accounts that were promised to us in Slack 20 days ago.