Hey guys,
First off, sorry for the long post. I think something as intricate and complex as this deserves some space. If you want to discuss this, please make sure you read the whole thing.
Secondly, I am writing this as an individual who has invested in Monkey Capital. I have not been asked to write this, nor does anyone involved in Monkey Capital know that I am writing it.
My name is Mathias and I am currently doing a PhD in next generation solar cell technologies. I work in quite a prominent field within solar cell research, and I have recently been offered to continue my work as a postdoc at Oxford University.
PhDs do not pay much in Australia, clocking in at about 2/3 of the minimum wage if you work 40 hours per week. Many of us put in more hours than that, which brings our average hourly salary even lower. Unfortunately, the salary for a postdoc at Oxford is just above that of a primary school teacher, and after almost ten years of studying, I am quite tired of being poor and having to consider whether I can afford medium luxuries such as an organic diet and craft beer.
Because of the pretty average PhD salary (they call it a living costs stipend in order to get away with it), I have been selling my weekends working at a bar for the past three years now, having about 2-4 days off a month, working an average of 60 or so hours a week. With all this effort, I had managed to save up a few thousand Australian dollars, and, reading about Ethereum, I decided to speculate in it. I opened a Coinbase account, transferred thousands of my saved up dollars, and I fortunately managed to double my money on Ether's rise.
Somehow, I came across Monkey Capital, and without fully understanding the white paper or knowing much about hedge funds and finance, I figured it would be an interesting place to put some of the money I had made on Ether. I waited patiently, watching the clock count down on the homepage, and one day a chart of Coeval vs. Bitcoin appeared. I immediately joined the Slack and learned that people had been trading Coeval for days, at massive gains! I quickly bought some with some Bitcoin I had on Coinbase, at 0.25 BTC, and saw the price skyrocket. I sold the rest of my Ether and bought more Coeval at around 0.375 BTC, and within two days my Coeval was worth $2,000 more than what I had bought them for.
I remember thinking that that amount alone would take care of most of my money problems until I finished my PhD, and that I could maybe even quit my bar job and spend my weekends on more meaningful work, or maybe just on being a normal human being, who didn’t have to sell his time off to make a living. One of my close friends was having problems with one of her housemate trying to screw the others over for thousands of dollars of rent, and I told her that I would now be able to cover that for her without problems if it did come to that.
Then, all of the sudden, things started coming apart. The price of Coeval started dropping. I put it off as a correction, and it did go back up a tiny bit, but it kept going down more than it went up. Out of nowhere, 20 million Monkey tokens appeared on the market, and nobody knew what was going on. The first round of dividends, to be paid out in September, would only be paid to that newly released MNY, and not the one that we would get for our COE. Furthermore, the released MNY was “pregnant” with more tokens, and the ones we’d get from the COE were not. People roared and complained about scams and cheating and not enough communication from the management. Then, around another 180 million MNY appeared over the course of a few days. The people buying the original 20 million were, rightfully, worried about their dividends, the price of both MNY and COE kept plummeting, and the terms of everything seemed fluid, seemingly changing daily or hourly.
This obviously brought a lot of anger from people spending over $1,000 on a COE token that now seemed to be worthless, considering you could get tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of MNY for a single COE. The Slack channel was flooded by accusations and profanities, and the Monkey management started kicking people out in what felt a bit like a purge of opposing opinions. This obviously only led to more anger outside of Slack, on Steemit and Reddit, and with no dedicated communications team, many of the accusations went without being addressed properly.
On top of this, problems with the Waves exchange of some kind meant that people were losing coins, and bots were able to use the spread in buy and sell price to suppress the small amount of growth the COE/MNY coins would have been able to enjoy, and the price just kept on falling and falling.
As of today, I have turned about $20,000 into just under $1,500. That’s American, not Australian dollars. I’ve worked so many long and hard shifts to save up the money to buy Ether with. I’ve spent so many hours stressing over whether to sell or hold when Ether went up, and even more as it crashed, taking a lot of my plans and dreams with it. And now the value of my coins has plummeted to less than 10 %. And will probably keep dropping for days or weeks to come.
So why aren’t I joining the army of angry people yelling scam and fraud, reporting Daniel and the Monkey team to the authorities? The answer is that I still believe in the project, and I am convinced that Monkey Capital is not a scam.
‘Why do you believe that this is not a scam after all of this? You’ve lost so much money on this!’ you might ask. Well, first of all and most compellingly, if this really were a scam, the Monkey team would have been long gone. The first batch of Coeval was released and bought up, then traded and re-traded. Since the price started dropping, very little new money would have entered the system. Most MNY was bought with Coeval, with a small amount bought with Bitcoin. Adding another token ahead of the announced release would not add more value to scammers, since they would have known that they would mostly be traded with the Coeval people already had.
Instead of running away with the takings, Daniel and the rest of the team have seemingly been hard at work setting up deals and getting funding to the point that no ICO apparently is necessary. Admittedly, the details of the deals have not been released, but it has gotten to the point that a guy flew from the US to Bangkok to meet with the team to discuss setting up call centres related to Monkey Capital. You could say that it is a scam with the aim of attracting more people to buy more coins so that they can use that capital to buy companies and make more money, but that’s pretty much exactly what the white paper stipulates. It only becomes a scam if no dividends are paid.
Secondly, you may say what you want about Daniel, but he has character. I have seen him vehemently defend the project as if it were his own child, while at the same time advising people against investing everything they have in it. He has always advocated spreading out risk to everyone who asked him. He has even offered and given personal loans to people who took out bank loans to invest, so they wouldn’t get themselves into uncontrolled institutional debt. I’ve seen him offer to lend people money to buy Coeval, only to ask them to pay it back when the price reached 4 BTC. He is constantly communicating with people on the Slack channel, even when people tell him to go to sleep and rest up for the benefit of everyone. To me, he seems like a genius who has a grand plan in his head and is charging ahead with it, and the rest of us are always trying to keep up with his thinking. Clearly, he should be focusing on running the business and communicate the grand ideas, while having someone in charge of the day-to-day communication, and I believe someone has recently been hired to act in just that role.
Clearly, if this were a scam, he would be spending most of his effort convincing people to put in more and more money before an ICO, then run a full on scam-oriented ICO with lots of promises, only to disappear. The cancelled ICO is a huge bit of evidence that extracting as much money from any fool stupid enough to invest is definitely not the idea behind this business.
The storyline for this ICO, if you want to call it that, has been far from perfect. Clearly, big mistakes have been made, especially in communicating drastic changes along the way, and that has led to people being scared and weary of the future of the project. I am sure that most people reading this will have a story similar to mine, hoping for a way out of wage slavery the daily grind offers, and just enjoy a bit more financial freedom. All this uncertainty leads to fear and doubt. Despite the uncertainty, though, the core values and overall idea behind Monkey Capital have not changed. Raising funds to invest in physical companies and pay dividends to the coin holders is still the goal. This has never been done before in the cryptosphere, and problems will always be abundant when new roads are paved in uncharted territory. That being said, I believe that the right course is set and the team running this is capable of pulling it off. It will take time, probably more time than what we are used to in the world of crypto, but that is the nature of setting up something of this magnitude.
If you are convinced that this is a scam, so be it. Everyone who believes that it is has already left, so you are not protecting anyone from spreading negative opinions about it. New investors will see what has happened and make an informed decision based on facts and performance, and presenting scare scenarios does not add to informed decisions. In my opinion, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to show that this is very, very far from a scam, but you are very entitled to believe otherwise. Just please don’t try to screw things up even more for those of us who are still in this. If your goal is revenge on Daniel, you won’t get it. He will be fine if this tanks. I, however, will not be. You are not working against Daniel or Monkey Capital, you are working against me. So please let me have a chance at my dreams, and stop trying your hardest to make Monkey Capital look bad, regardless of the nobleness of your reasons.
Do I regret investing in Monkey Capital? My only regret is not waiting a few weeks, to be able to buy everything at dirt cheap prices now and ride that Monkey rocket to the Moon of Financial Freedom!
I am happy to discuss my experiences with anyone who wants, feel free to contact me or write comments on here. Please keep profanities to a minimum, I’m not here to throw shit, and please double-check your spelling and grammar, though. We are all adults trying to get ahead here, and it is so much harder to take you seriously if you can’t properly construct a sentence or spell basic words.
I wish you all the best,
Mathias