Former Polymath CEO Trevor Koverko rips massive fart during Toronto Raptors victory celebration, reports Coindesk.
(TORONTO, Jurassic Park) — The Toronto Raptors were not able to get the home court blowout they were looking for, but one Toronto startup seized the opportunity to squeak out a victory of their own this week. As first reported by CoinDesk, a popular cryptocurrency news website, Toronto’s Jurassic Park was rocked thursday evening by the masterful delivery of a plaza clearing fart by former NHL player and playboy Trevor Koverko. Koverko previously served as CEO of cryptocurrency startup Polymath, and has been known to appear periodically to do what crypto insiders refer to as “pump his bags” to boost the price of the Poly cryptocurrency by making a big stink. After dropping the gas now dubbed “PolyFart” it is safe to say Koverko delivered.
Ripping out a fart like this takes careful planning and execution. You want to make sure it comes out strong, but you don’t want more than you bargained for. For PolyFart, as our reporters have learned, it all started on a typical grey March Toronto day, when an idea was born that was anything but typical.
“It started as a joke. The marketing kid was freaking out about having something new to announce and I reminded him that I could literally rip a fart and CoinDesk would write a story about it. I didn’t think he would take it quite so literally, but here we are.” Koverko shared.
But take him literally that marketing kid did, and this week marked not just the passing of the gas, but the culmination of months of hard work and planning. So how did PolyFart come together? To really understand the fart, you need to know the man standing behind that fart — and that’s Graeme Moore, the marketing kid dynamo of Polymath.
A unique path to crypto
For Moore, the blockchain learning curve has been steep. Just a couple years out of university, and having recently earned his certification as a Holistic Nutritionist, he was the unlikely choice to share this story.
“I thrive on trying new things, and I really had to start from scratch at Polymath. Not long ago I thought my destiny would be in marketing nutritional supplements. Convincing people they need something they really don’t need, that really won’t do anything for them — that’s hard. People call it snake oil. It’s demoralizing. Pivoting into crypto marketing has been a total 360 for me, but I’ve found a way to use my experience to spread the good word of Poly.” shared the humble Moore.
The obvious choice to pull Polymath’s finger
“We knew Coindesk was the only place to bring this news. No, really, it’s the only place who will share this shit.” Moore shared.
Crafting the perfect fart
“A lot of people don’t know this because we’ve tried to hide it, but Trevor hasn’t been CEO for like 9 months. It’s tough to pump this guy up when he’s not doing anything and we can’t talk about his replacement, so the fart really was a gift. It gave a new sense of purpose.”
The Polymath team went into full planning mode in March. This would be their time to shine and they had the playbook to do it:
1) Make an announcement of an announcement. Coindesk loves to publish these.
2) When you make the announcement, breeze past the part where people may discover you haven’t actually done anything yet, and then…boom. Drop a partner’s name. This partner should be someone who has previously actually delivered something.
3) Claim you are the first ones doing this thing, even if others already have. Nobody checks that shit.
4) Party
The team at Polymath was back in their element planning for PolyFart and morale was back at ATH. Koverko described the scene: “We have a big poster above the door at the office — a print of the Oprah meme we tweeted during our ICO where “YOU get poly, EVERYBODY gets poly.” It’s what inspires us. It’s also what inspired the SEC to get all up in our ass, but we don’t talk about that. Anyway, we have this little tradition where we high five Oprah on the way out of the office, like Notre Dame’s “Play Like a Champion” sign they all hit when the team leaves the tunnel. I could feel the energy come back into the office in March. One of the eBay guys even high fived Oprah when he thought nobody was watching.”
A moment of fear
Indeed everything was going Polymath’s way, until a scare during the call to brief CoinDesk on the fart plan threatened to take the wind out of their sails.
“When we got on the call to brief Nikhilesh De from CoinDesk on the fart, it started off in a super scary place.” shared Moore. “The guy jumped right in with real questions. I mean like actual journalism. We’d never heard anything like it before!”
“Polymath promised the first Security Token Offerings by June 2018. They didn’t come, and yet in August 2018, Trevor named a handful of STOs in an interview with Leigh Cuen. What ever happened to those tokens? Later you got Brady Dale to write about locking up Poly tokens. Was that a diversion because news of your fundraising struggles had leaked? After all this time do you still believe the stampede is coming, or has it passed Polymath by?” De asked.
“I didn’t know what to say. Really, I don’t have answers for any of that stuff. I thought this might be the end of our free ride from Coindesk, so I closed my eyes and threw up a Hail Mary.” Moore shared with us.
“Ummmm, Mr. De, sir?” I said in a super friendly Canadian way. “I’m super soory aboot this and I know you’re new and stuff, but usually CoinDesk journalists either share what we write for them, or they only ask the questions our PR guys have provided.”
Moore explained to us that the editors at CoinDesk have an “understanding” with some companies in crypto, and their PR agencies, and give them a free pass from journalism. They just take their announcements, however trivial, and report them as news. For journalists like De and his colleagues, it is the nature of the beast. Sometimes they get to research and write great stories, other times they just do what they are told by their editors.
The free ride for Polymath will come to an end sooner or later, but this was not that day, and CoinDesk would go on to pave the road to PolyFart.
Moore continued, “Those seconds of silence felt like minutes. It was terrible, but it finally broke with shuffling papers, a throat clearing, and a response from Nikhilesh:
“Oh, shit! Dude. I am SO Sorry! My bad.” he laughed. “I had this in the wrong pile. Sorry about that. I found your instructions and the questions from your agency. Here we go. Let’s start over.”
With a sigh of relief and things back on track, the Polymath guys decided to have a little fun with the young reporter.
Moore continued, “Nik worked his way down to my favorite question which I wrote for him to ask: How many STOs have been launched on Polymath?”
“Zero.” I replied. Totally deadpan.
“Uhhhhhmm. I know man, but aren’t we supposed to say 100?” Nikhilesh replied.
I busted out laughing.
“Just testing you, dude!!”
“We shared a good laugh about that one. I mean, imagine if people knew that after all this time nobody has successfully done an STO for a token created on Polymath. Like, not one penny raised, ever. That almost happened back in March, when Jeff Gee shared a detailed analysis of every token created on Polymath. The data is clear, none of these things are real. Luckily people don’t want data in crypto, they want pumped bags and big, juicy farts!” Moore quipped.
“Leeeetttttss just call it…120. Yeah, put that we launched 120 security tokens. Nobody will check.” Moore eventually answered.
From then on, everything went according to plan, right through to the big reveal of PolyFart this week in Toronto.
With the Raptor faithful gathered in Jurassic Park, Koverko waited to release the fart at just the right time. As the home team made history across the continent in California, Toronto had a new hometown hero in Koverko, who lifted his cowboy boot and blew a fart so big it wiped that big stupid grin off Drake’s face.
After that, it was time for step 4 of the strategy: party. Polymath is known for throwing a good party. Some question the rate at which they burned through the $59M raised from the ICO they conducted in 2017. But what else should that money go to besides throwing parties? And exchange listing fees. And wash trading. And a revolving door of tech leadership who each run screaming from the building faster than the ones before. And parties.
With Bitcoin back on the rise, and companies like Facebook getting in the mix with the imminent launch of their own cryptocurrency, people may one day forget so called “shitcoins” like Poly ever existed, but they will never forget the fart smelled ‘round the world. We would not have that without Polymath, and we would never know about it were it not for CoinDesk. We all appreciate that CoinDesk is there to bring us stories like this, but nobody is more appreciative than Polymath.
“CoinDesk consistently gets real journalists to stop what they’re doing and shill our stuff. It makes it seem like we’re actually doing something that’s real news. We haven’t really delivered on our promises, ever, so for CoinDesk to do this for us is truly awesome and we do not take it for granted. Much respect to them.” added Koverko, in a quote written by Wachsman PR.
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