Investors versus founders. Situation analysis

Two years later, after an unprecedented boom, ICOs start to “pop up the corpses” of startups that failed to realize their plans, one after another. One of them is the Russian Esonics.

For the cryptocurrency community, the year 2017 was remembered as the period of hundreds of ICOs, in which thousands of investors almost without hesitation invested millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, two years later, it is time to take stock, and they are disappointing. The vast majority of startups, which had high hopes, have already died or fell into stagnation, and investors have lost their money – all or most of them. Among startups that have sunk into oblivion was Russian Esonics, who planned to make money on the production of components for miners.

Compared to ICO giants such as Bancor or Tezos, the Esonics project didn’t stand out, but it had some good inclinations. At the time of the announcement of the ICO, he had been releasing “his” mining equipment for several years, had his “own” product line and production facilities – of course, in China. However, the design was carried out in Russia, and at the peak of GPU mining, Esonics products enjoyed some popularity.

Unfortunately, exchange “bears” ate not only the capitalization of cryptocurrencies, but also miners and equipment manufacturers who did not have a sufficient margin of safety. Not escaped the sad fate and Esonics.

The planned ICO, as usual, was preceded by media coverage. In particular, Esonics representatives invited a Bits.media correspondent to their office and demonstrated product samples. This article has been copied several times. Esonics also wrote about the ICO: Forklog (now removed), ITPortal, and Smile Expo conference organizer at habr.com. Esonics organizers also supported the topic at bitcointalk.org.

Further presentation of the events related to the sale of tokens comes from one of the participants of the Pre-ICO named Evgeny.

How was the pre-sale

The Esonics ICO started with PreSale in October 2017. Only 10 people participated in the presale. No, we did not come from articles in the media or from forums. One way or another, we knew the project team, i.e. we came “by acquaintance” and under guarantees and the authority of the team. The project was interesting, I wanted to support the guys, all the more so since it was “ours, our country”, and bad news goes about domestic projects, saying “domestic projects are scam”. I really wanted to refute this.

Esonics’s reputation has rested on several fairly popular members of the community:

Denis Soldatov, technical consultant. The founder of the Russian-speaking community of Ethereum, DevOps at Parity Technologies, the creator of the mining operating system GenEthOS. Member of the Expert Council on Legislative Support for the Development of Financial Technologies in the Russian Federation under the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market.

Igor Matyukhin, Coordinator of the Russian-speaking community Ethereum. Member of the Expert Council on Legislative Support for the Development of Financial Technologies in the Russian Federation under the State Duma Committee on the Financial Market.

Here is a list of Esonics key employees from the company’s old website:

At the end of September, Igor Matyukhin created a chat on Skype in which we all talked with the team both on the topic of the project itself, the equipment produced, mining and technical issues, and on the topic of upcoming ICO stages. Often in conversations from team members, assurances were heard that they were accountable to investors with their reputation and authority.

Each of us, in addition to this general chat, talked with one of the team members in personal chats. Unfortunately, not all investors got in touch with me and at this time I have information about the investments of six more people (except myself). The four of us on the cryptocurrency transfer on the presale were personally supervised by Denis Soldatov, one by Igor Bezrukov.

10/04/2017

Before the presale, the contract 0x4f2080A901591Ecd858c55b8c999483568b791Dc was created with multi-signature for 7 people. We transferred our ETH to this contract in mid-October 2017. Some translated BTC to the addresses provided to them.

The BTC wallet that Denis Soldatov gave to one of the investors for transferring investments to the project there – 39QiyaGQdmw169aNiZ32ytCWV8wtorqmXH – Transaction.

Below are all the transactions made during the presale:

As we can see, all the money received on PreSale was put up on exchanges and it is very likely that they were sold.

All PreSale members received Esonics project tokens in response to their investments. We received and began to wait for the further development of the project.

After PreSale, which was to be held before the beginning of November, PreICO was planned from 11/06/17 to 12/01/17, and the ICO itself should have passed from 02/19/18 to 03/16/18.

However, things did not go further than PreSale. In accordance with the table above, all funds received at PreSale were listed and probably sold.

In the topic on bitcointalk.org, the last message from the team dates from 02/08/2018:

“The timing of the ICO Esonics postponed for a month and a half. We are developing new products and we need to adjust the marketing support strategy for ICO. In the near future we will post more detailed information. ”

For some time on Skype, excuses of inaction and assurances that everything will be fine continued, but over time there the team completely stopped communicating.

2018 year

Further attempts by investors to get a response from the project team for almost a whole year have been unsuccessful.

After this message from October 8, 2018, the team finally stopped communicating with its investors. Nevertheless, investors again and again appealed to the members of the Esonics team both through general chats and directly with a request to provide information on what became of the project, what are the further actions of the team, etc. to which they received typical answers “the project is not closed” “we are working”, “we will try to give information in the near future”. In what this work was manifested no one knows. They no longer provided any specific information.

2019 year

Already this year, after several unsuccessful attempts to contact various Esonics employees, Eugene again turned to Denis Soldatov personally, but also did not receive an intelligible answer about the future of the project.

In the end, a desperate investor sums up the results of a campaign lasting more than two years without the slightest return:

Almost 2 years have passed since the date of the PreSale of this project. The team raised money, collected for its reputation, did not fulfill any promises. He doesn’t make contact, he does not return money. Complete silence and ignore investors.

So how much does the reputation of people like Denis Soldatov and Igor Matyukhin cost? As it turned out, it costs only 104.099 ETH and 1.40521255 BTC.

In conclusion, I would like to say that we, the investors of the Econics project, did not expect that people would be ready to give up their reputation for such a small amount.

Current situation

Esonics initially looked like a healthy and promising project. But the cryptocurrency hype ended for many “completely unexpectedly”. The company, obviously, was not able to recapture the costs with a radical drop in demand for its products, finding itself in a pretty overstocked state, but without “living” money. However, even taking into account financial problems, the project team did not behave in the best way, turning on the wrong track of disclaimer to investors who invested their money “under the reputation” of the founders. This looks all the more strange from the side of public people who have never hidden their identities and continue to work in the cryptocurrency industry.

After unsuccessful attempts to solve the “behind the scenes” issue, former investors of the failed ICO Esonics decided to go public and express their position through cryptocurrency media and forums. In particular, a topic was opened on Bitcointalk, in which, finally, the first response appeared.

Developer Igor Bezrukov, on his behalf, as well as Nikolai Navtalyan and Alexander Shmagailo, invited investors to pay the debt with Esonics products, mainly watchdogs and monitor emulators. Although the demand for them is now low, it is still better than nothing. There is no talk of monetary compensation yet.

In addition, Bezrukov holds the main responsibility for embezzlement of investor money on Denis Soldatov and Igor Matyukhin, whom he calls full-fledged project participants (Matyukhin, in addition, remains CEO of Esonics).

Denis Soldatov and Igor Matyukhin are currently working on the team of another blockchain startup – Evercity, which is developing the ecosystem of the “smart city” using smart contracts. Their comments on the Esonics situation as they become available will be published in this article.

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