Einsteinium

Just a little background, I like to do long term investments in crypto. I started with BTC years ago, then Ether, now NEMcoin. I wanted to diversity a bit more and started reading up on various other coins that were sitting at a low coin/USD rate. Einsteinium(EMC2) caught my eye due to claiming to donate part of each block reward to the Einsteinium foundation which will fund various science/research projects chosen by the EMC2 community. This sounded very interesting to me and the information on the landing page of their website seemed to show the project was operational and successful. Stating they had already donated over 16,000,000 coins towards scientific projects. I decided to check into it and see if the project was worthy of investing in.

General Overview and Initial Impressions

Einsteinium is based off of the scrypt proof of work algorithm and has recently (as of this month) switched to being ASIC resistant allowing GPU miners to do the bulk of the work. 2% of each block reward goes toward the Einsteinium foundation (to fund science/research) and and 0.5% going towards marketing, give-aways and faucets.

According to their website the foundation is a registered non profit in Canada as of April 2014. This initially made me feel more comfortable about investing in the coin as Canadian law would hold them to some standards when it came to their accounting practices.

The team behind the project is in full view at the bottom of the landing page which made me feel even more confident this was a solid project to get behind.

The first concerning thing I noticed was there isn't a white paper anywhere on their site and it seems one was never made for this project. Note: Their website does contain a lot of the information found in a white paper: Their purpose, a roadmap, etc but without any kinds of dates or projected releases or any of the methods they would use to get to their goals.

Then I realized that no matter which link I clicked at the top, I couldn't find a list of science/research projects that had been donated to. So I started digging.

Findings

The Team

I first decided to look at the people involved in the project. I expected to find people with mixed backgrounds primarily in the science/crypto fields, but instead found only the latter.

Their chairman, Malden Trifunovic, has a brief bio and a link to his linkdin page. This shows he worked with GameCredits in 2015 to 2016. He also held the trademark for the GameCredits logo but filed an abandonment form with the trademark association less than 6 months later. His most current employment history is Founder of Blue Lab IT. This was curious as Einsteinium lists Blue Lab as a partner towards the bottom of their landing page.

The Details

I decided to poke around the Einsteinium website a bit more. The blog portion shows unrelated entries such as What would happen if a country converted all of it's currency to bitcoins?. The news portion is more relevant and focuses on updates to the project but didn't really seem concerning.

While clicking through, I realized I hadn't read the detailed background page for the project. In the second paragraph states, "Einsteinium coin is a Bitcoin-like currency with a philanthropic objective of funding scientific research, cutting edge IT and crypto currency projects. Our community members vote on which valuable projects receive funding awards."

I had to re-read it a couple of times because the purpose is slightly different in a significant way. Compare " funding scientific research, cutting edge IT and crypto currency projects" with the mission statement on the landing page.

If you read their mission statement, it plainly states they donate to science projects. In their background they state they donate to science projects, IT projects, and crypto projects. Considering the chairman owns and IT company this seems like a huge conflict of interest. Going to Blue Lab IT's website we find:

So not only does he own an IT company, he owns an IT company that specializes in crypto. Even more of a conflict of interest.

Scroll even further down Blue Lab's website and we see a reiteration of what was found on Einsteinium's background page.

At this point I was convinced I would never buy into this coin, but I still wanted to see what projects they had donated to.

I searched for quite some time and even asked in their discord server. I could only found one other project they donated to other than the one listed on their website. This other project was for diabetes and I read an unconfirmed report they donated $1,500 worth of EMC2 to both projects. That's 4 years of getting 2% of miner rewards and paying out $3,000 (all in 2014.) The foundation's twitter page hasn't been updated since 2014 as well.

Looking at the blockchain explorer we see the Foundation's wallet holds 2,076,917.45 EMC2, that's worth over $2.9 million as of this writing.

Looking more at the transaction history we can find many transactions being sent out (much later than their last funded project) at various times for various amounts. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

I don't know what those transactions were used for, but it's hard to believe it was for funding science.

Conclusion

While presented well, the coin's purpose really falls apart once you start looking into the people and the history of it. I'm no market expert and I won't tell you what you should invest in. I'm just telling you I personally couldn't do it after seeing the potential conflicts of interest and very large and random transactions from the foundation.