- Manifold Finance’s FOLD token crashes to 64 cents from high of $87 due to product disappointment.
- Founder Sam Bacha keeps quiet and responds to concerns with memes and jokes.
- A once-promising startup raised $2.5 million from venture capital firms before falling into a downward spiral.
Manifold Finance, a once bustling crypto project, has plunged into turmoil.
Its erratic founder is inaccessible, its token price is plummeting, and its frustrated supporters are demanding updates.
Manifold’s token, FOLD, hit an all-time low of 64 cents on Nov. 8 — 98% of its 2022 high of $87 — even as crypto markets surged following Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States.
Fold’s value peaked at over $87 and was trading above $30 as recently as April. In 2022, the company’s market value exceeded $128 million. Now it’s only $2 million.
Disappointing response
The token crashed amid a disappointing response to Manifold’s year-old liquid staking product, which was supposed to rival crypto giants Lido and Rocket Pool.
It also suffered as a major backer stopped providing liquidity for the token on decentralized exchange SushiSwap earlier this year.
Meanwhile, founder Sam Bacha has failed to provide regular updates on an upcoming product intended to reverse Manifold’s decline. Self-imposed deadlines have passed.
Bacha occasionally commented in a 2,500-person Telegram chat without offering any explanation about his whereabouts or Manifold’s progress, instead cracking jokes and sharing irrelevant memes, infuriating some supporters.
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Support lost
Even one of Manifold’s most prominent investors, crypto influencer Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie, said in the Telegram chat group that he had lost faith in the company.
“I invested in it in 2021, and at the peak it was worth about $5 million and now it’s worth 0,” Fish said. DL News. “I don’t know what to tell you, yeah it looks like it failed, crypto investments are risky, maybe I should have sold the top, it is what it is.”
“When was the last time you talked to Sam?” Is he still alive?
— Support on Telegram
Philipp Zahn, co-founder of Manifold partner 20squares, declined to comment. DL Newsbut referred to the company as a “former customer.”
Bacha and Manifold employee Alexander Bradley did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Manifold isn’t Bacha’s first project to go sideways.
His latest crypto startup, Block Array, appears to have disappeared and has been dogged by fraud allegations. Additionally, this is not the first time he has gone weeks without providing the status updates that are de rigeur in the crypto industry.
But with the collapse of Manifold’s symbol and the anger of his supporters, Bacha’s behavior took on a more worrying tone.
This is the latest example of the pitfalls of free crypto culture.
Past problems
Bacha graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013, according to his LinkedIn account, which says he worked at AT&T and Amazon before founding his first blockchain-based startup in 2017.
The Block Array website and white paper were inaccessible Friday. The X account for its Freight Trust product has been suspended. Freight Trust’s token EDI is rarely traded and, despite a total supply of 600 million, had no market value on Friday, according to Etherscan. Block Array’s token, ARY, is also worthless, according to Etherscan.
Malicious bots
Manifold was founded in 2021 to help crypto traders avoid encountering malicious bots. It raised $2.5 million from P2P.org, Marshland Capital and several other venture capitalists.
A version of this anti-front running software was developed for SushiSwap, a decentralized crypto exchange.
But it was quickly abandoned due to software bugs. SushiSwap declined to integrate a revamped version of the software, choosing instead to continue development of an in-house version.
After forays into other crypto middleware, Manifold eventually turned its attention to liquid staking, a multibillion-dollar business long dominated by DeFi giant Lido.
But Manifold’s liquid staking token, mevETH, saw little success after its launch a year ago; market value peaked at $36 million in March.
Certain operations
Since then, she has been working in collaboration with the German research company 20squares on a new product, XGA.
XGA is intended to ensure rapid confirmation of certain transactions, which sometimes wallow on Ethereum when a user does not pay sufficient fees.
Many investors hoped that XGA would bring the company out of its doldrums. However, without warning, Bacha stopped providing regular updates on his company’s work.
“Where have you been for the last 30 days?” Why not just one answer here on the channel?
— Support on the Telegram channel
Crypto security firm KebabSec has launched an audit of XGA’s code, Bacha said in a September 2 update shared in the Telegram group chat. It is unclear whether this audit has been completed.
Bacha also said that Manifold will begin testing XGA on an Ethereum-based testnet on September 17. An overhaul of FOLD’s so-called tokenomics would be detailed by the end of this month, he added.
None of this appears to have happened.
“When was the last time you talked to Sam?” Is he still alive? asked a supporter in the October 28 Telegram chat.
Later in the day, Bacha broke his silence to seek comment on Manifold’s revamped website. And he promised he would share more information quickly.
“Today, comrades, I will release the long-awaited update,” he wrote.
This update never arrived.
Dark atmosphere
On October 30, Bacha took to Manifold’s rarely used governance forum to propose that the Manifold community move its conversation to the social media app Discord.
The proposal was rejected by its supporters, who said it was the least of their worries.
“Where have you been for the last 30 days?” Why not just one answer here on the channel? The mood is rather dark,” one wrote.
“I was being tapped to become Trump’s new crypto czar,” Bacha responded in an apparent joke.
Missed deadlines
In a later message, he attacked his supporters who had accused him of not meeting his self-imposed deadlines.
“The deadlines I proclaimed in Telegram do not in any way constitute a binding agreement,” he wrote.
After the Nov. 5 election, Bacha returned to the chat to share a meme derived from the movie “Superman II” in which a supervillain commands, “Kneel to Zod!” »
Supporters fear the worst.
“We don’t even know if Sam codes. We don’t even know if anything is happening,” one wrote.
Two possibilities
There were two possibilities, the commenter continued: either the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and “they don’t know how to tell us,” or “they’re working tirelessly” to get XGA out.
On November 11, Matthew Land, a partner at Manifold investor Marshland Capital, said on another Telegram channel that he had spoken with Bacha over the previous weekend.
Land declined to comment when contacted by DL News Friday.
In his Telegram message, Land said he spoke to Bacha about “the importance of communication” and resolving FOLD’s liquidity problem.
“As I said before, the ball is in Sam’s court and on Sam’s schedule,” Land said.
“He understands what is happening in my opinion, but unfortunately we have no impact on his decisions/timetable to respond to it.”
Correction, November 15: A previous version of this story stated that Matthew Land spoke to Sam Bacha about the price of FOLD. It has been corrected to reflect that they talked about FOLD’s liquidity issues. This story has also been updated to reflect that Land declined to comment.
Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi correspondent based in New York. Do you have any advice? Contact him at aleks@dlnews.com.
