someone-build

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

If you know anyone working on a product to effectively manage treasuries for Ethereum teams, let me know how I can help.

I've watched multiple teams blow up from some absolutely horrible treasury and token management.

- Why are teams sitting in cash earning no yield?
- Why are teams taking funds and offering cash bonuses when you could offer tokenized options?
- Why are teams doing TGE when they could auction and sell token options in rounds instead?
- Why are teams paying for backdoor CEX listings and market making when DEX liquidity using stuff like Drome or a plan for protocol owned liquidity are more capital efficient?

I get we do have a standard for SAFTs, TGE, and general treasury management, but its disgraceful that we keep doing the standards that are clearly less transparent and worse for consumers and investors. We have an SEC that clearly is open to experimenting as long as everything is above board. Now is the time!

CC @mattimost.eth this has to be something that Reserve could help with in the underlying tokens.