So, I messed up….

On January 9th, 2018 in this video, DataDash told his viewers that he was compensated for promoting the Substratum and Condicator projects during ICO. DataDash goes on to explain around 3 minutes in the video why he promoted an unregistered security offering that has not filed a Form D Notice to the SEC for an exemption to Rule 504 or 506 of Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933.

“Now, I want to first and foremost take it one step at a time and talk about Substratum. As you all know, I have talked about heavy on how optimistic I am on this. I have made a wide variety of content on the Substratum project on my channel and because of that, I know it might seem like that is a conflict of interest. But, I want to break it down. First and foremost, when I made the video that I got paid for in regards to Substratum, it was back during the summer, it was back when my channel was much smaller. Like I said, I was very excited about the Substratum project. I heard about this project when a variety of the community, at least 2 or 3 people had brought up to check out the whitepaper. At the time, 2 or 3 people mentioning the project was pretty exciting, so I know I had to look into it. I got really excited about what Substratum had to offer and this project and the idea of a decentralized web. I still am extremely excited about it….

This is very interesting and important to note following the bold sentence from the video. Nicholas Merten aka DataDash is only mentioning “the video” as if he was only compensated for one video. Similarly, Justin Tabb (CEO of Substratum) has stated the same thing to the Substratum Network Telegram community on January 10, 2018. Justin Tabb states, “we paid for 1 video from DataDash when he had 9k subscribers*, the VERY first video, Everything since then has been his own”.

This will be important to note later on as there are severe time discrepancies between both parties claims and several transactions that align with video release times.

“I don’t want you all to take this as if I’m negative on it. But, it turned out at the time when I was planning to do a review on it, I happened to get reached out by an intern at the company about doing an ICO review on it. I said sure, yeah I was excited to cover it. I ended up covering the project and at the end of it, I received a form of payment. Now again the payment was not the motivation, keeping transparent with that but I did accept the payment. And to be transparent with you all, from my understanding if I’m looking back on it again… I have quite a short term memory. I will provide all the resources down below so you can see them for yourselves. I was paid 6 ETH back during the summer as well as 100,000 Substratum tokens….

Now, earlier on Nick stated, “when I made the video that I got paid for in regards to Substratum” and Justin Tabb also stated in response to Substratum community members questioning Nick’s video on January 10, 2018, “we paid for 1 video from DataDash when he had 9k subscribers*, the VERY first video, Everything since then has been his own”. However, doing additional digging into Nick’s provided “transparency” wallet, I was able to notice a few severe time discrepancies and compensation for not “one video” but rather 2 videos.

On Aug 11, 2017 at 02:56 UTC, DataDash posted this video titled SUBSTRATUM (ICO) | Creating the decentralized web. About 2 hours later at approximately 04:58 UTC, this payment of 4 ETH was received from the Substratum Crowdsale Wallet. No other transfers or inbound tx’s occurred until August 30, 2017 so we can conclude with reasonable certainty this 4 ETH was his only payment for the video posted above.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. According to DataDash and Substratum CEO Justin Tabb, only “one video” received compensation from the Substratum team. However, that appears to not be the case here and there is a clear intentional effort to cover this up from both parties.

On Aug 30, 2017 at 04:19 UTC, DataDash posted this video titled SUBSTRATUM (ICO) INTERVIEW | Justin Tabb. About 37 minutes later at approximately 04:47 UTC, this payment of 2 ETH was received from the Substratum Crowdsale Wallet. Also, 1 minute later at approximately 04:48 UTC, this payment of 100,000 SUB was received from the Substratum Crowdsale wallet.