How crypto companies go bankrupt:

Yesterday, I learned that Phaver social media app had closed operations with all socials gone.

Token down 99% since TGE in September.

I had high hopes for Phaver merging Lens and Farcaster ecosystems, with 35K DAU and 800k downloads. 

At peak, they had 50% of Lens traffic and 20% of Farcaster's.

I asked their team member on what happened and three things stand out:

1. They messed up TGE & airdrop. It led to hours of portal failures, causing FUD as people couldn't claim immediately.

2. They overpaid for CEX listings: Paid more than $1m USD for 5 CEX listings. $SOCIAL still trading on Bybit, KuCoin, Gate etc.

3. Ex-employee said the team decided not to sell any tokens at TGE as FUD was already too high. This was a mistake as they were short on cash for operations.

TL;DR – Phaver ran out of funds. As a Finnish company, it also had to pay employees during the 1–2 month notice period.

All this despite raising $8m at $80M valuation from Polygon Ventures, Nomad Capital

Lesson in this: 

1) no need for 5 CEX

2) DCA out a bit to fill liquidity, even though this is not very popular