(XMC, XMO and XMR)

Three and a half months ago, XMR changed their PoW algorithm in the hopes to prevent miner centralization on their network. By changing the mining algorithm, ASIC’s are now no longer able to mine the new XMR chain. To take this one step further, the hope is that mining companies will also stop developing ASIC’s for XMR completely because if they do, the PoW algorithm would simply be changed again.

So far, this tactic appears to be a success! If you look at XMR’s hashrate, you’ll notice a significant drop in April followed by a fairly even plateau. This strongly suggests that ASIC’s were being used to mine XMR starting way back in February 2018:

Also, the hashrate distribution seems to be evening out as well. This is a chart before the hard fork on April 6, 2017:

This is a chart a month and a half after the fork on May 19, 2018:

This is a recent chart from July 17, 2018:

As you can see, the last chart is a stark contrast to the hashrate distribution prior to the hard fork and definitely shows it more evenly distributed throughout the network. However an unfortunate side effect to the PoW change was that it gave birth to four forks of XMR, which raised a lot of questions:

Who was behind these projects? Which exchanges would list them? Is brand confusion between all the forks and XMR a danger? Would the market actually choose ASIC friendly coins?

Well now that three and a half months have passed, we can definitely say that these projects are dead. Of the four, only two are currently being traded according to coinmarketcap. Let’s take a look at their volume as well as the level of activity on their githubs to determine whether or not these forked coins pose any real threat to XMR.

1. XMC and XMO Are Being Traded…Barely

XMC 7/16/18

XMO 7/16/18

Notice that both their volumes are very small. XMC has a volume of $106,000 in 24 hours while XMO has $15,000. Both these volumes (and also the price) pale in comparison to XMR’s volume of $38,000,000.

XMR 7/16/18

2. Their Githubs are Ghost Towns

XMC’s Github

As you can see, there has only been 1 commitment since Mar. 27, 2018 which really was just forking the monero-project. Since then, there has been 0 commits and 0 additional contributers.

XMO’s Github

Here you see XmanXU making several commits during the last week of March in preparation for the Hard Fork. But since then, the commits have been cosmetic i.e. just updating the description of the project and the README.md file.

3. Github SockPuppetry?

I decided to click on the last commit in May for XMO because the 1 comment stuck out to me like sore thumb. What I found was a random comment left by KPhilly cheering the XMO project on.

This definitely peaked my interest because it had “sock puppet account” written all over it. So I clicked on KPhilly’s github profile and lo’ and behold: an empty github profile.

KPhilly a.k.a. Kent Phillips’ github profile only had 1 day of public activity in June 2018, and all he did was create an empty repo calling it KPhilly/kentphillips. I checked out http://www.kentphillips.me/ (which is the website the repo points to) to learn more about our good ‘ol pal Kent. Turns out it’s just a dead website.

Then I decided to check out XmanXU’s profile, the github user who forked XMR to XMO.

Turns out he has 3 followers, all who’ve forked random projects like Viacoin and Digital Note but have done 0 work on them. I believe they forked these projects just so that the profiles wouldn’t look empty if someone came across them. In light of all of this, I’m fairly certain that XmanXu and XPhilly’s github accounts, if not all the accounts tied to them, are sock puppets.

Conclusion

The lack of commits to the respective repo’s of XMC and XMO mean that these projects are unmaintained. In fact, I doubt they were even serious projects. This then begs the question, why did they even fork in the first place?

My personal hunch is that they were used as a scare tactic against the XMR community for changing their PoW, as a hedge just in case people actually saw value in an ASIC friendly Monero chain, or as a quick cash grab as they dumped their forked coins (See XMC and XMO graphs above).

But one thing is for certain. All 4 of the projects born out of the XMR hard fork in April have become completely irrelevant.