By Samuel Wan , Analyst at CryptoSlate
YouTuber Coffeezilla, AKA Stephen Findeisen, has been exposing SafeMoon in a series of videos that allege fraudulent practices at the organization. Primarily, this relates to the theft of user funds from the “locked staking pool.”
In response to the allegations, former SafeMoon CTO Thomas “Papa” Smith approached Findeisen to give his side of the story.
Former SafeMoon CTO responds to the allegations
Allegations of key personnel committing fraud at SafeMoon prompted Smith to contact Findeisen for the right to reply. Findeisen said he respected the move, as “it takes guts to take on hard questions.”
On the allegation of team members dipping into the “locked liquidity pool,” Smith said the auto-locking function was in place. However, following John Korony’s appointment as CEO, on March 10, 2021, Korony subsequently moved to eliminate the locking feature.
“I think, at first, we were trying to do the auto-locking. And when the organization started, John leveraged to have it unlocked. So there was a lot of shifting at first.”
Findeisen countered by saying funds were taken from the “locked liquidity pool” before Korony’s appointment. He sent Smith evidence of this in the form of a blockchain transaction showing an outflow of 36.7 trillion tokens from the liquidity pool, dated March 5, 2021.
Smith said Findeisen is entitled to ask those “types” of questions, but he has no answers.
The investors are the victims here
Keen to find out more about Smith’s remuneration package, Findeisen flat out asked:
“How much money did you profit from SafeMoon?”
Smith claims his work netted him around US$2 million. Despite reframing the question at various points in the interaction, Findeisen indicates Smith held firm on that figure, but there are suspicions that he “profited” much more than US$2 million.
Digging deeper around the idea of secret/hidden wallets, Findeisen established that most of Smith’s payments came from the anonymous SafeMoon founder, “Kyle.” Carrying on with this line of reasoning, Findeisen probed Smith on where Kyle was getting the tokens to pay him.
Publically, SafeMoon claimed that expenses were paid for by acquiring presale tokens held in the “deployer wallet.”
However, crunching the numbers reveals that only 5 per cent of Kyle’s tokens came from the presale. According to calculations, Kyle acquired roughly 88 per cent of the tokens by dipping into the “locked liquidity pool.”
Smith denied any knowledge of Kyle’s actions and said his role at SafeMoon was that of an employee despite the title as he was working under a contract through a different firm.
