Something strange is going on with Shiba that I need to talk about.
As you might know, I've reported on Shiba a few times
in the last month, and I pride myself
on spending the time upfront to
make sure I really understand what I'm saying
and remain impartial when I present anything.
I wanna give you the facts.
I wanna add in some entertainment and then
let you on your way.
One way that I'm able to remain impartial
is I've never taken a sponsorship
to talk about an investment,
but this is fairly common on YouTube.
Many people will take sponsorships
and for good reason, they pay crazy money.
Sometimes life changing money.
Now I'm pretty lucky that
I make good money outside of YouTube.
I've owned service businesses my entire life,
and this gave me a net worth of over a million dollars at
age 21, way before I ever had my
first YouTube video.
And I still own a moving and storage business
to this day.
And I live very frugally.
I drive a car I bought for like $2,800,
and I spend maybe $2,500 a month on
all my bills and personal expenses.
So I don't need much.
But sometimes crazy offers
come through my email, like this one about Shiba.
This is how it goes.
Hey Max, How are you doing?
We are huge fans of your channel
and we saw your recent videos about Shiba Inu.
We would pay you $30k (of course in SHIB)
for another Shiba video where you
talk about the latest development update
and Shiba Inu partners.
We handle the Shiba Inu influencer strategy,
we incubate new Shiba Inu ventures
and we work with Shiba partners.
Our group consists of a few very large Shiba whales
and early members that want to
build out our ecosystem.
Getting this,
first off made me never want to talk
about Shiba again,
but I tried to bait for more information
because I suspected that this went deeper.
Also, remember, one of the principles that Shiba was
founded on, was no paid promotions.
So this just all felt weird.
So I replied and said,
Could you send me more details
of what would be required of me?
Also, could you send me other people's videos
who have done promos?
And they said - Hey Max, how are you?
Do you have any feedback on this?
I don't really understand that part, but
they said Coin Bureau talked about Acria yesterday,
and this was very surprising.
I was like, wait a minute.
This is like the last person I would
expect to do a paid promo.
So I clicked on the link to see the video where
Coin Bureau was talking about upcoming crypto events,
and the founder of Acria network
is flashed briefly on the screen
when he's talking about a lineup
at a specific crypto conference.
So saying "Coin Bureau talked about this"
is an absolute stretch.
And you might be thinking, what does Acria have
anything to do with Shiba and
just wait, because this gets so much deeper.
It's ridiculous.
Because we first need to talk about
Lindsay Lohan, [Laughs] seriously.
This Lindsay Lohan.
She tweeted that she's an angel investor
of the Acria Project while mentioning
Coin Bureau talked about it.
To which he replied,
Never heard about it. Never talked about it.
Okay, back to the emails.
I responded saying,
I guess I'm not sure what you're
requesting of me. Is there something specific?
Because I'm completely lost at this point.
I have no idea what this Acria network
has to do with any of this.
And here's where this all
starts to come together.
They say - we would like to collaborate with you
to discuss Acria network in one of your upcoming videos.
They are our new partner project
and we are supporting them.
They are becoming the leading cross-chain
oracle solution right now
and they are working with many leading projects.
This all feels extremely sketchy to me.
So I do [Laughs]
I do what I do best, and I spent
literally all day digging through
every piece of information
I can find on the Shiba partners
and this Acria network.
So you're probably wondering,
Did I take the $30,000 deal?
No.
And it's not because I hate money.
[Laughs] I love money.
And as I mentioned earlier,
that's enough to pay my bills
for, like an entire year or
buy my mom a new car.
Thinking about it that way
It's kind of painful to think about, but
principles are principles.
But I still wanted to learn more
about this because I knew there was a story
behind this, and let me tell you this story,
it gets weird.
Ice Cube and literal raccoons
are both involved in this story.
So the sponsorship.
This is coming from an entity called
shibatoken.capital
Apparently they're a Shiba venture fund
looking to build on the Shiba ecosystem.
I'm not totally sure how connected
they are to lead developers at Shiba,
or if there's any connection whatsoever,
because there's no names
and no faces on their site.
But their site does say,
that Shiba is partnered with Coinbase,
ShibaSwap, and the Acria Network.
I needed to learn more about Acria.
Here's their website,
Cross-Chain Real World Data Network.
Scrolling down, we can see the CEO
Dominik Ernst, who is
"a well known German developer".
And a youtuber who goes by
D.I.Y investing, who is the CMO of the project, a
"famous Youtube influencer".
Now it's important to note that
Acria has not yet launched.
They're not tradable, but they do have an ICO,
a coin that can be purchased off market,
meaning you can buy the token before it's
actually tradable.
In order to buy the token,
you have to actually make an account on their site
and then from there, you need to send crypto
to one of these addresses
or wire transfer money to them,
and then you'll receive these Acria tokens.
This is a big red flag.
Now, going back to their website, we can see the
supported staking assets are Shiba.
Now, it's a bit hard to interpret what this means,
but apparently somehow the Shiba token
will be used to stake Acria.
This is also odd
because looking at an older version of their website
from about a month ago, we can see that there used to be
far more options here.
So before things get really weird,
What does Acria even do?
This is what their site says.
One of the most pressing issues when
developing smart contracts is the lack of
real-world data.
But due to technical limitations
such as the consensus protocol,
no blockchain has been able to solve this major limitation.
This is kind of true in that
smart contracts need real-world data,
but there are literally oracles running
right now that do this and do it well.
Well, I mean Chainlink powers something like 80%
of all DeFi with off chain data.
But you'll notice a trend of claiming
"This is the first" or
"This has never been done before" in these projects,
and throughout this video.
So speaking of smart contracts,
here is Acria's founder petting a raccoon while explaining them.
- So, you already heard of it maybe,
So, smart contracts are not really smart
in the case of, they don't have any
intelligence or AI or something like that.
Then I read their white paper, and besides a
few awkwardly worded sentences, it was okay.
Typical oracles will have data
go from sources to validators
to wherever that data is needed.
Acria feels that this leaves
data susceptible to attacks
and bad actors.
Instead, they propose taking data
straight from a source
and providing it to
whoever needs that data,
effectively cutting out the middleman.
Now this doesn't seem impossible.
However, I would like to point out that
the "middleman" that Acria is referring to here
are literally there to make the
data more reliable.
You can see in this diagram how Chainlink,
the most popular crypto oracle, works.
Data is sent to validators who then
kick out dishonest data points
before sending the result to an aggregated contract.
Now I'm not saying that there can't be
more than one way to do this,
but the way that it's presented in
the Acria white paper
and by the founder is just-
it's a bit odd.
Either way, we need to figure out how this
project has gotten any credibility so far.
I mean, they have no launch date,
they have no roadmap.
And I found that some people have been
invested now for over a year
with no major updates
and they're getting a little bit worried.
On their website, they proudly present
that they were featured in CNBC.
After some searching,
this is what they mean.
An article from CNBC about the
Dogecoin Millionaire.
In this article, the Dogecoin Millionaire
proudly states that he was paid $25,000 in Doge
for his partnership with
The Acria network.
Honestly, at first, I was a bit offended.
They gave this guy $25,000
and they only offered me $30,000.
They lowballed me.
But my second thought was
I need to find this video,
where he was promoting.
So looking at his page, I found nothing.
But after doing a lot more digging, I found this in this.
In this video, you can see the
URL of the video
that this YouTube channel is reacting to.
So I typed that URL manually
into a browser at the off chance
that the Dogecoin millionaire had
unlisted the video.
And guess what? I found it.
I found the unlisted promo video.
And here's what he had to say about the project,
- Look, the best part about this is
not only will you be staking your
Doge coin and getting passive income with that,
there's going to be a high demand for the
Acria token too once the platform goes live
and people are gonna wanna get some.
So you also have a chance
to 100X your money by getting
the Acria token as well.
- And why did he invest?
- So some people have been telling me
about this new and interesting
project that won a big award in Germany.
It's called the German Innovation Award.
- And this isn't the first that we've seen the
German Innovation Award because
it's literally plastered all over Acria's site.
They want you to know that they won this award.
But what even is the German
Innovation Award?
I've never heard of it.
[Laughs] Let me tell you, the story isn't done yet.
This just gets insane.
Looking at their site,
they claim to award innovative products.
Now, if we look at the winners tab,
we can see this year's winners,
and it seems pretty straightforward until you start to
scroll and you see the sheer volume of winners.
I counted,
and there are 310 products
that have won the German Innovation Award
in 2021 alone, almost one every day.
And then I found out that you can actually
buy one of these awards and be a winner.
So this is obviously for marketing purposes
to make products look stronger.
But, they surely do some
judging to ensure products
are truly innovative right?
Well, I'll let you be the judge.
Here are two of the winners this year.
First the Plankpad, a wooden balance trainer.
and this cat scratching post.
The pinnacle of German engineering.
Now, speaking of Lindsay Lohan
and the Doge Millionaire,
in my deep dive, I noticed something else.
They both happened to tweet about the same
NFT project called Blockships.
I figured, what are the odds of that?
So I did a little bit more digging.
The project Blockships
also happens to be, you guessed it,
a German Innovation Award winner.
[Laughs] I couldn't make this up if I tried.
And then I looked up good ol' CEO
Dominik's LinkedIn to see to his background picture.
Now what's weird about Blockships?
Well, first, they claim to be the
first NFT to be stored directly
directly on the blockchain, which is a little bit
odd to say when you look at the fact that
Etheria did this in 2015,
six years ago,
or when you remember that literally
every single NFT built on Cardano
is stored directly on the blockchain.
Even I had an NFT stored directly on the blockchain
before Blockships did, because
I minted an NFT on Cardano
for a video a few months ago,
before Blockships was even a thing.
But it doesn't stop there.
Looking at an archived version
of the Blockships' website,
they have some really strange promos.
It looks like they used a cameo type service
where you pay celebrities to say stuff.
To have not only Steve Wozniak
talk about the project, but also Ice Cube
- Yo what's crackin'? It's your boi Ice Cube.
You ever heard of a NFT before?
Yo check this out, I'm a huge fan
of Blockship
NFTs. (☉_☉)
Steve and Ice must have
caught onto what we're doing because this
version of the site has been completely wiped clean.
Now, I know this has been quite the journey.
So where does this leave us?
Of course, we can't say with
100% certainty that either of these
projects are scams,
but we can say that they very often
use misleading tactics to promote
their projects and to try and gain credibility.
And it seems there's at least some connection
between a few large Shiba holders
and this Acria network.
However, we don't know how deep that connection is
or if there's ties to lead developers at Shiba.
It's also important to note that
promoting a crypto is not
technically illegal.
Now, there is some gray area here.
On one hand, I don't blame anyone who
takes a sponsorship,
however, I believe it should be disclosed
that they're being paid.
The creator should take the time
to be extremely careful about
who they promote, because this stuff matters.
And I personally think that
any sponsorship should ultimately
benefit the viewers,
even if that simply means
creating better videos with
the additional funding for the channel.
Now, I don't want any hate to go out to the
Doge millionaire because I'm going to give
him the benefit of the doubt here and say that
he wouldn't have done this promo if
he did the same deep dive that I did.
And on that note, if you'd like to support
my content further and help me dig
myself out of this $30,000 hole I
put myself in, just make sure you subscribe
to this channel.
And if you're ready to take this relationship to the next level,
you can join my Patreon community
that's linked in the description.
There, you'll find even more of my research
and market insights, free coaching from
top mentors, access to my portfolios,
a private community, and a whole lot more.
I'd like to thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a profitable day.
Hey everyone, Lindsay Lohan here.
I'm a huge fan of NFTs,
and I just discovered blockships.
It's the first real NFT that saves
all of its data onto the blockchain.
So check it out today.
I'm supporting it.
*creepy smile*