GUEST ARTICLE

Disclaimer

This is personal research, there are probably some approximations, feel free to do your own research, double check the assumptions, hypotheses are not facts, not facts. This research is INCOMPLETE, and probably not fully accurate. It’s an investigation without much help from the manager in charge of funds.

The manager is shady, denied simple facts and is nowhere to help while he exactly knows what happened. Admins announced an investigation was ongoing but nothing came out in the last days, and people are asked to wait.

In lack of any official help for this, I did with what I have, the blockchain…

I’m not involved in CP, in this current deal, or any other deal. I probably won’t be in the future neither.

Introduction to CP and Hero Node Pool context

CP ICO Buy Club has been the latest pool to change owners in what has now become a classic in the ICO Pool scene. Owners whom identity is often known as they may sign SAFT and expose themselves in conferences are now most backing out in a “change of ownership” process where they claim they don’t relate to the pool at all. This pooling activity is most of the time illegal and could cause them some severe troubles in real life (laundering, undeclared business, undeclared work, etc.)

So now who is really running this pool is unclear, but officially “fulltimejetsetter” also known as Denis, is not involved in current deals. He still is the source of all previous and pending deals, including Hero Node.

So as of now, CP is officially:

Run by a few admins on a voluntary basis (from the admins own claim).

Denis aka @fulltimejetsetter is gone

@icobuyclubadmin appeared and seems to be running the previous deals.

I didn’t keep track of CP change of ownership that much, can be wrong.

So, for this Hero Node pool, the first delivery was expected recently, came late and with some FUD.

Claims from CP admins

Pools got refunded 2/3 and “they” fought to find the remaining tokens.

This explains the delay

This statement got me interested “Instead of refunding 2/3 of our members funds we decided to find third-party sources to make this deal possible.”

Considering HER was trading x0.39 in ETH at that moment, it doesn’t make sense.

So basically you’re saying we got 1 000 ETH back and instead of refunding, we bought some HER “from other sources”. At maybe the current market price? Keeping the difference?

Tracking ETH and tokens

So let’s see what happened (diagram XML source at the end).

LMAO….

Full size: https://image.ibb.co/gTOF3o/Untitled_Diagram_6_2.jpg

This represents where the HER tokens came from and in green the ETH flow.

So from now we gonna analyze 3 things:

What happened to the CP Hero Node pool, where are the missing tokens. Comparing the claims of CP to the facts here. A few notes of what’s going on in pools.

IMPORTANT: the number are often approximations, I didn’t include the decimals, etc. I’m looking for the big picture, not doing some lazy shaver accounting.

Part 1. What happened to CP Hero Node Pool

CP ran a Hero Node pool for 1492 ETH. They expect 29100 HER per ETH net of fees.

The delivery happens in 3 equal installments, so the first should be 9 700 HER per ETH.

But people only got 8 665 HER per ETH in the primablock.

So analyzing the transactions, CP did 3 deals (maybe 4), each has a different HER rate, but ultimately it should be what people were promised.

The first deal, the “blue pool”

CP sent 550 ETH to the blue pool.

Blue Pool sent 550 ETH back to the red wallet

Red wallet sent 500 ETH to Blue pool (50 ETH eaten by red wallet, that’s the first missing piece).

In return, Blue pool sent 4.8M HER to Red wallet which finally landed back in the first wallet.

Notes on the blue pool

Bought HER at 11 666 HER per ETH for this round

Distributed at 9 998 per ETH (nice shaving…)

But the biggest contributor, CP, got even a worse deal at 9 666 HER per ETH.

Notes on the tokens in the red wallet

For reasons only @icobuyclubadmin (aka @fulltimejetsetter aka Denis) could explain those tokens were not sent to the CP pool wallet.

They were sent to other pools as detailed in the diagram.

Ultimately he had to buy the tokens on the market to deliver them. It’s a fact the tokens from Idex have been bought, a reasonable hypothesis for Bibox.

Conclusion for the “blue pool”

Pool sent 550 ETH, but only 500 ETH ended in Hero Node presale wallet. Red wallet kept 50. Red wallet then sent 2 x 50 ETH back to CP wallet, could be a refund (not in the diagram).

CP got close to the expected number from that pool but still short.

Questions for CP

Why red wallet kept 50 ETH?

Why CP had such a bad deal from Blue Pool?

Why CP sent the “blue pool” tokens to another pool, delaying CP delivery?

Why tokens from this deal finally had to be bought on the market?

The second deal, the “yellow pool”

This one is more straightforward. CP sent 433 ETH in 5 separate TX to enter Primablock for Hero Node. 5 transactions as the max contrib per wallet were 100 ETH, so they had to use 5.

In return, they got 4.3M HER for 433 ETH, 9 962.67 HER per ETH.

Not much to comment on that deal, the blue pool deal was below the expected rate this one is higher.

So at this point, I don’t see any other clear ETH movement leading to the Hero Node presale wallet.

The third deal, the “maybe deal”

But we also have 3.85M HER tokens getting into the CP wallet without explanation.

Going through the CP wallet, I find this transaction which I could relate to the 3.85M HER tokens delivered.

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2e3f7c5ae24eefab865c446fec43264f7031d6159892b3c287d95dde8411505c

So this could be a 3rd deal: 3.85M HER for 390.9 ETH, 9 849 HER per ETH.

Wrap up

So if we consider the 3 deals, we have

4.8M from Deal 1 (550 ETH, with 50 ETH eaten by red wallet)

4.3M from Deal 2 (433 ETH)

3.85M from Deal 3 (390 ETH)

Total : 12 997 546 HER tokens.

At 9 700 HER per ETH, this covers 1 339 ETH while the pool is 1 492 ETH, so we have 152 ETH missing.

How much has been spent? 1373 ETH vs 1492 collected. So we have 119 ETH who just remained unspent in the CP wallet.

If you had the 50 ETH added by the red wallet, it makes a 169 ETH total of “unspent money” which you can relate to the 152 ETH of missing tokens.

Is the mystery of the missing tokens solved? For me yes. The community should now ask for the refund of those approx. 152 ETH which are unspent and didn’t get tokens for.

One Last Thing

But there can be another theory, I’m sure the “manager” will be keen to come up with to try and keep the ETH. If you look at the CP wallet, just after the 390 ETH transaction there’s a 157 ETH transaction leading to a Primablock.

This could match for a try to spend the remaining pool funds in a Hero Node pool

The primablock is in refund state nothing came up from that.

I’m really not sure this was related to HER, the CP wallet has a lot of transactions. This 157 ETH transaction is leading to 0x24990b302499066e04d1adDEEc77A93F24f38FA6 before the primablock.

Looking for this @ led me to… ICO Whale 🤔

This convo is from March 8 and relates to a DIW pool, but the answer from presumed admin seems to validate this is an @ ICO Whale used.

Update: I tried to dig what happened to those ETH, and they have in fact served to refund the primablock. This is probably unrelated to HER, I mean I don’t say the HER ETH have been used to refund another pool, it just happened in a period I’m looking at and led me to dig it.

Part 2. CP ICO Communication

How does this compare to CP ICO claims?

The original announcement

It all started there.

This is the message that got me interested, though not concerned.

No there is no scam and all of our tokens are safe.

Ok. It’s still VERY shady.

CP has no clue where 150 ETH have gone

CP got the worst deal out of the blue pool

The diagram tells a lot about how CP is managed… doesn’t look that great.

We have reports of competing pool groups trying to spread FUD for their personal gains.

Each will appreciate the situation, but given what I dug above, @fulltimejetsetter attitude and the non-existent investigation on your side, I’d find it hard to recommend CP.

We were oversubscribed for this deal.

True.

Second, our initial allocation from Hero Node got slashed by two thirds. Instead of refunding 2/3 of our members funds we decided to find third party sources to make this deal possible.

Only CP knows what happened with Hero Node.

But we could say:

The Yellow pool was your allocation and it got reduced 2/3 as you say.

You had no allocation at all and found allocations where you could.

The deal you got from the blue pool is really awful though compared to others.

This was very hard to do and our sources delayed getting their tokens to us which resulted in this delay. Your tokens for month #2 and #3 are fully safe.

Delay effectively came from the mess of the tokens origins and having to buy some on the market.

For the future safety, considering you have more than half of the pool going through third parties, it’s still a gamble, you depend on them. But I reckon it’s standard in the pool and ICO scene.

Now for the legendary @icobuyclubadmin aka @fulltimejetsetter aka Denis.

So officially he’s retired and gave the control to the pool to some new guys, but still in charge of previous deals.

He gonna strongly deny he’s the former manager and also strongly deny he’s the owner of the red wallet. But both assumptions are very likely true imho.

He denied the tokens bought on Idex while it’s now a fact and he’s very likely the guy doing it. He didn’t bring a single piece of valuable information to what happened nor any clue to where the missing tokens were.

He still ate 50 ETH in the process of the “Blue Pool” and considering the huge HER activity in the red wallet probably shaved some.

Part 3. Welcome to pools in 2018

While pools have been a nice way to get into projects in 2017, the bear market of 2018 changed a lot of things, and you can have some insights at what’s going on with this investigation. People including pool managers used to make money flipping ICOs, now pool managers mostly make money finding with fees, VIP subscription, bonus, shaving and basically anything that can make $.

In all fairness to CP ICO, this happens now in all / most pools, and afaik CP is far from the worst.

So what is a pool in 2018?

An anon admin with a former pseudo-retired manager

Admins working for free 😂

What we can see in the diagram

They’ll try to find allocation by any means necessary because that’s how they make money with fees.

They aren’t getting the best deal for their community, anyone with 1 ETH in the blue pool got a better rate then CP with 500 ETH.

“Red wallet” ran a 10 121 HER per ETH pool, delivering the manager 800k tokens extra of what the pool expected. Who is the lucky guy?

Btw that pool and the other he ran, got the tokens from the CP deal in the blue pool 🙈

Red wallet has a lot of random HER transactions. Who is it for? Admin compensation? Shaving?

HER deals have all kind of rates per ETH: 10 121, 9 962, 11 666, 9 560, etc…

CP has still yet to comment and find an issue for the missing tokens in the deal we had a look at earlier. The claimed investigation brought nothing as of now.

CP admin (at least one) know probably way more then what they say. Some have been here since the beginning. Some probably know who the “red wallet” belongs to. Some probably know if @icobuyclubadmin is @fulltimejetsetter. Why you protect this guy that much if you work for free?

ICOs are rekt in 2018. The best deals aren’t in public pools open to anyone. Even in private ones, its bad. They Flip and make money on you, be safe. They won’t care much when tokens are missing and you’re rekt.

You have the power to end this. Stop buying from those guys, turn down the abusive VC deals (this is now used to put higher fees on any deals).

2018 is SKIP

As people asked, you can donate here:

ETH: 0x096858C575a12CbA3c13c3eb527Da65e69BF7dB9

BTC: 3Dyd9ibNBRxKPGWpA9GCAPxJTy8MB6PQGz

Diagram XML source: https://pastebin.com/Ki7bXkDA

Download, rename to .xml if needed, open in https://www.draw.io