Two years after the founders of UroCoin stated one of their coins would equal the price of one metric tonne of urea, the entire operation seems to have disappeared.
UroCoin: Predictable Dysfunction
UroCoin, which supposedly sought to introduce get-rich-quick crypto to the urea market and help disadvantaged farmers in the process, no longer even has a website.
“We have already responded to many false accusations and will not waste valuable time responding further,” co-founder Bohan Huang gushed in one of his now-infamous interviews in summer 2014. “We are here to advance Uro.”
At the time, UroCoin’s market cap was at an all-time high of $4.39 million. Today, it is $45,834, having languished flaccid at around that figure for the past year.
Unsurprisingly, Huang’s “responses” have now shriveled up altogether, along with his promised “advances.”
The scheme had its critics from the outset, with Huang and fellow co-founder Nilesh Nair publishing various forms of “proof” of legitimacy and beating away accusations in interviews.
A counter-case was slowly researched and produced on Bitcointalk, producing evidence which, unlike larger-scale assumed scams such as OneCoin, were met with little dispute.
The Bitcointalk material highlighted that Nair had been declared bankrupt, that Huang was 5.6BTC in debt on BTCJAM alone (currently 4.06BTC), and that the pair had systematically lied about the history and nature of their various supposedly-registered entities.
All Fooled
Nonetheless, perhaps through carelessness rather than naivety, CNBC was still advocating UroCoin as a legitimate offering as late as April 2015, when the coin’s price and market cap had long since crashed.
More recently, Twitter activity hinted the scheme was set to be revived, commentaries however suggesting its former network of “supporters” could be attempting to gain some final profits from what was never a real venture.
“For expansion to a greater community, we believe the press and the existing community would play a big role in terms of both getting the word out and finding new ways to promote Uro,” Huang once stated. “In terms of getting more buyers and traders in the commodities sector involved, it is a slow, ongoing process that is being done every week.”
The last tweet from the Uro Foundation was made in February 2015, and its block explorer, announced a month previously, returning an error message on BlockCypher.
Currently, Urocoin’s “website” as listed on Coincap.io directs to the r/Uro subreddit, where launch announcements from 2014 have become mixed with urology discussions and a more-than-fitting complaint by a user suffering from a fractured penis.