Synthestech was an ICO to fund research into transmutation of elements, using cold fusion — turning copper into platinum. Literally, an ICO for alchemy. Turning your gold into their gold.

The ICO was started in late 2017, and had its public launch in March 2018. I wrote it up at the time.

(The reactions to a retweet of that post late last year made me realise there was probably a book in this stuff — perhaps with a working title like World’s Worst ICOs.)

Synthestech’s ICO didn’t go so well. But they’ve found a new business model that they can pivot to — alternative medicine dietary supplements. Containing their allegedly-transmuted elements.

Cold fusion? What?

My March 2018 post has more detail. But, in short — cold fusion is the production of new elements by purely chemical means. It has the unfortunate problem that it can’t work, it doesn’t work, and no experiment claiming to have achieved anomalous energy production or transmutation of elements by chemical means has ever been reproduced.

Synthestech’s claimed scientific breakthrough — announced, not in a Nobel Prize winning paper in Nature, but at a press conference — is to use a bacterial slurry that, they claim, produces traces of elements not present in the original slurry.

This contradicts all known physics and chemistry, including some of the most accurate and well-tested science humanity has ever come up with. But, as the original promotional video says (1:12) — “The project Synthestech was launched exclusively with the commercial world in mind. So scientific theories were initially left aside.”

The ICO didn’t go so well

The Synthestech ICO — to fund research into literally impossible magic beans — claimed a successful presale of $300,000. The main public sale launched in March 2018.

The ICO had a hard cap of 14 million STT, with an initial soft cap goal of 1 million STT. Foundico — which rated this ICO for a product that can’t possibly exist at 7.0 out of 10 — listed the STT ICO’s collected funds as $737,260 as of July 2019, though it’s not clear how this was calculated.

The token appears never to have been traded on any crypto exchange. But you can still buy tokens directly from Synthestech — for now!

The medical applications of impossible magic beans

Synthestech had mentioned the medical uses of platinum in their original ICO white paper.

By October 2018, they were exploring the medical angle in more detail. A blog post talked about “modern researchers” who thought transmutation occurred in biological organisms — “it is directly connected with the rhythms of life,” and “if it acts as intended, supplements with these elements will become the most sought-after drug.”

By February 2019, Synthestech had decided that this was their new business direction:

There are significant reasons to believe that Chemical elements that are obtained by transmutation is a powerful source of biochemical energy, which the ancients knew. Perhaps the most powerful man available. [Presumably they mean “the most powerful available to man.”] The potential that is present in the “fresh” element is transferred to the body. This gives a very strong stimulation to the natural regulators of body functions. Therefore, its action promotes active rejuvenation. About these facts there is a huge amount of information in the ancients — Chinese, Indian and Tibetan medicine. … The ancient chemists, in contrast to the popular version of the desire to get gold, silver, having carried out transmutation, sought to get mostly “fresh” elements. Because of the incredible medical properties of such elements. … A trace element in the dietary supplement is no more than 1–3 milligrams (0.001–0.003 grams), or even less. In the fall, we plan to start producing raw materials for dietary supplements.

Synthestech is going to go through their bacterial slurry, and extract tiny amounts of elements that are commonly sold in dietary supplements — claiming that, since these are freshly synthesized atoms, they’ll be near-miraculous as medicine.

In a video stream on 28 May 2019, Synthestech founder Vladislav Karabanov explained how they still had the goal of synthesising precious metals — but that would require large capital investment.

The vast dietary supplement market would make money in the short term for the token investors — with possible returns of up to $2 per token. “In Japan, an employee is not hired if he or she does not use dietary supplements.” Huge if true.

The initial products would be supplements of iron, chromium and colloidal silver. Colloidal silver is a mildly effective topical antiseptic — but it’s most famous in the West for its popularity with survivalists, disaster preppers and conspiracy theorists, and for the fact that regular consumption turns your skin blue.

But Karabanov was quick to clarify — “our colloidal silver is also called colloidal silver, but in fact, it is essentially a completely different product, because it is obtained as a result of cold fusion.” So maybe it’ll turn you a fresher shade of blue.

The supplements will be sold under the brand name Synthesit, and feature the Synthestech logo. A July 2019 promotional video tells of the benefits of “live” elements. This is an amazing video, and I urge you to take the ten minutes to watch it.

You can get elements like zinc, chromium, iron, selenium and so on from existing dietary supplements — but these are unsatisfactory, because they just aren’t live enough to do the job. Synthesized elements — formed in volcanoes, apparently — were the secret of ancient medicine! The ancient Biblical patriarchs lived for hundreds of years in good health, you know.

Those foolish “mainstream physicists” will tell you that an atom is made of a certain number of protons, neutrons and electrons, and any two atoms of the same isotope are literally identical objects at the quantum level — individual atoms don’t have little labels to tell one apart from another. But the video counsels us that we need “living and synthesized elements, as recommended by Taoist masters.” This knowledge comes from researching “non-obvious sources.”

You can pre-order the supplements now for $49 — hurry, and get a bonus bottle free!

Oh yeah, the ICO tokens

Karabanov also clarified for token holders: “I think that now it makes no sense to put our tokens on an exchange.” Cryptocurrency exchanges keep getting hacked, you know. But perhaps the business of magical supplements will make them all rich.