Important Message from the Founders of TLP
The Lupecoin Project (TLP) began as a fun way to reward the people who remained active on CryptoTwitter during the bear market of 2018. The origins of the project were as follows:
Cryptocurrency had reached staggering highs at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018. This record market brought a lot of new faces and enthusiasm into the cryptospace as a whole. During the next six months most currencies crashed hard and have yet to recover. During May of 2018 there was an all too brief ‘alt-season’ which also subsequently crashed. Many of the new faces turned from happy faces to depressed faces and some actually just turned plain mean (aka salt). It was a particularly unpleasant time to be on cryptotwitter. A number of memes began appearing which made things a little lighter and a little more fun. The Bogdanov Twins, Pepe dApp, CryptoOwenWilson started talking about avocados, and then @senorLupe showed up. @senorLupe was a breath of fresh air with his always sunny attitude, his always positive messages, and his funny broken Spanglish.
In June of 2018, a group of us were brought together by @CryptoOwenWilson (Now @SenorHansel) to create a coin that celebrated the fun @senorLupe had brought to the space. We want to emphasize here that there was never any intention by any of us to denigrate or make fun of people of Mexican descent, cowboys, or anyone else. What we loved about @senorLupe was his always positive, friend to everyone attitude. Ultimately, it was his unwavering optimism that won over our hearts.
We never expected Lupecoin to be anything but a meme, a fun way to show ‘proof of friendship’ during the time of salt. However, what happened was something pretty incredible. @SenorHansel and the other team members welcomed anyone to the project who wanted to be involved and the level of talent that flocked to TLP was absolutely mind blowing. In almost no time we had a creative team working on an animated series, a technical team working on the backend, a team of writers and administrators setting up the logistics, a legal team, a music team, and even an auto team. It turns out that what many people in crypto were looking for was a truly decentralized and open project to be a part of. Team LUPX was it!
It’s hard to believe that so much has happened in such a short time. Equally hard to believe (but true) is that we, the founders, never learned the true identity of @senorlupe. As a measure of gratitude, and so that he could share the love, we gave him a 10% stake in our pre-mined ERC-20 token, LUPX. We know him from a twitter handle and from an ethereum account — but that is all. Although he seems to be a great guy (or maybe she seems to be a great gal), we really don’t know who @senorlupe is. And maybe that’s for the best. We have never seen any sort of malice or racist behavior from @senorlupe, nor do we believe that he or she created the @senorLupe account with any racist intentions.
In any event, with the meteoric growth of TLP, the growing popularity, and sudden viability of LUPX as a legitimate project with exciting use-case(s), we recently had it brought to our attention that @senorLupe may be offensive to some people. We have had people we greatly respect point out that while funny and positive, @senorLupe is not a positive portrayal of Mexicans or Spanish speaking people in general. Our first reaction was to point out that @senorLupe’s twitter persona should not be taken so seriously, but upon reflection, we recognize and respect these objections. While @senorLupe is always positive, the stereotype he is born from is not. This is in no way undermining @senorLupe. However, Team LUPX feels as though it’s important to remain open and sensitive towards any such concerns or stigmas. After all, it has been and always will be our mission to spread love, friendship, and smiles to our community.
As such, we have made several decisions for our project moving forward:
- First, we have decided to change all of the official logos which contain the images of the @senorLupe Twitter account including the logo of our coin LUPX. This decision was made due to our project not owning the rights to use the image.
- Second, we will no longer engage in the use of broken English or Spanglish in our official documents or official publications.
- Third, we want to point out that aside from giving @senorLupe a 10% stake in LUPX, he is not and has never been a part of our founding team, an official contributor to LUPX or TLP, and is in no way associated as a person with LUPX, #TeamLUPX, The Lupecoin Project, or even the Lupecoin Creative Department.
- Fourth, we do not sanction racism, hatred, bigotry, or judging people by their race, religion, nationality, sexuality, or any other exterior criteria. We believe that all people are created equal and deserve equal and fair treatment.
- Fifth, we are sincere in our desire to create a positive and welcoming community in TLP. We do not want anyone to ever feel they are not welcome (as long as they are nice).
We are grateful for your support and appreciative of the chance to prove that we stand for uniting all people through our project.
Sincerely,
The Lupecoin Project Founders
