TL;DR: Warnings about a new cryptocurrency project, HEX, continue to grow in severity and number. Brainchild of controversial influencer Richard Heart, HEX claims to pioneer a take on the certificate of deposit idea as applied to cryptocurrency. Heart, once a virulent BTC maximalist, has changed his tune in recent months, criticizing his former tribe and, in turn, drawing their ire.

Warnings Grow About New Cryptocurrency Project HEX

Popular analyst Alex Krüger recently took-on the prospect of HEX. He set out his biases immediately, referring to HEX as “the latest useless ERC20 token. Its ongoing token sale has raised about $3 million in $ETH. Its only purpose is to hopefully go up in value by attracting new suckers. It is marketed as ‘designed to do over 10,000x returns in under 2.5 years,’ which reads great for attracting the uninformed and the greedy.”

Krüger’s keen to compare HEX’s hype to that of notorious and obvious scam, Bitconnect, by implication due to similar-sounding return guarantees. “Crypto speculators have a fantastic track record of giving money away in exchange of useless tokens,” he continued. “Take TRON for example. Sun raised hundreds of millions [through] an ICO and treasury tokens,” to which he chalks up to simple avarice.

True to form, HEX’s Richard Heart invited Krüger to discuss the matter. “You have the chance to help my audience not get scammed. Please come on livestream and earn them,” Heart challenged. “I’m ready as soon as you are.” In response, Krüger was terse and pointed. “I shared my opinion,” he refused. “People [are] free to do with their money as they please.”

ZUX

BTC maximalists, however, have another beef with Heart altogether. He’s an apostate. Once defender of the true faith, BTC now, BTC forever, BTC only, Heart has pivoted strongly toward Ethereum and has openly criticized maxis for lying and holding the world’s most popular cryptocurrency by market capitalization back from badly needed advancement.

For doing so, Heart’s main cadre of critics are maxis such as Giacomo Zucco who, unlike Krüger, took the HEX founder’s offer to appear on his livestream. Zucco was affable, setting traps for Heart during their brief exchange which was abruptly ended supposedly due to a technical glitch on Zucco’s end. Zucco simply allowed Heart to lay out his case for HEX and why it was different or advantageous for crypto enthusiasts, hoping it would be enough to convince potentially wavering maxis of the project’s absurdity.

In reality, Zucco had been promoting a parody website aimed at Heart and HEX, ZUX. The site apes HEX’s claims, mockingly insisting itself to be “THE FIRST PROVABLY-ZERO-SUM COPY-CAT META-SCAM IMPROVING THE HEX SCAM TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE SCAMMY,” in typical Zucco comedic style. The ZUX site is quite an elaborate yarn, and clearly made from a deep, deep place of enmity for both Heart and HEX. It considers cloning HEX, for example, imploring potential grifters to use “established monte-carlo methods to randomly select a few minutes to listen to (dear God, not whole 3 hour live-streaming episodes, please!!!) from the youtube channel of the Axl Rose look-alike (we are not going to provide you with the link here: you just have to follow enough idiots on Twitter, some of them will eventually link the channel in your timeline),” and so on.

I Would Urge Everyone — Especially the More Prominent ‘Crypto’ Figures — to Speak Out

Goldman Sachs parody avatar, Goldman Sats (GS), dished out a less than humorous deep-dive on HEX, titled Under a HEX. It too comes from a decidedly BTC maxi perspective, but takes-on HEX in several aspects — most of them economic- based or incentive-related. GS is careful not to invite regulators in just yet, explaining, “While I am entirely against goverment intervention here, and shudder at the tweets tagging the SEC in conversations about HEX, I would urge everyone — especially the more prominent ‘crypto’ figures — to speak out.”

Refreshingly, if only by way of breaking from the usual hysteria, GS argues he hopes “a more bottom-up emergence of norms around how we treat scams, and those that deal in them. HEX could ultimately be a value by serving as a [Schelling Point] for this industry — the thing everyone can agree is a scam, and converge around, limiting the fallout.”

The problem, as always, with any BTC maximalist critique or warning, is the intense signal to noise ratio. By definition, everything, literally every single other project, is on the so-called scam spectrum for maxis. It makes it difficult, to say the least, for noobs interested in the burgeoning crypto industry to figure out which is legitimate and which is a bonafide scam. And at some point for maxis it’s a theological question: if everyone is guilty, then no one is. BTC itself is often derided as the greatest scam in human history by some in the legacy finance world, for example. Scam has almost become a meaningless term when applied by maxis.

“Not only will Richard control close to half of all HEX after the first year,” GS elaborates, “but it is the first token I have seen to have its founder’s perpetual self-enrichment baked into the protocol.” That’s a common critique and one that fails to place HEX in the usual binary Ponzi or Pyramid categories. It’s more complex, worthy of discussion and dialog in the way, perhaps, Goldman Sats has attempted. Of equal concern is that maybe, just maybe, BTC maximalists have so overplayed their hands in brandishing the “scam” and “scammer” labels that no one is listening, and especially not formally one of their own now the object of so much scorn.

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