Ex-Moonbirds COO’s New Startup Flux “Turned Over”: Is The Project Overblown?

After the blue-chip NFT project, Moonbirds became popular, not only the price of the minted NFT skyrocket but also the reputation of the behind-the-scenes team members increased greatly. Recently, Ryan Carson, the former chief operating officer of Moonbirds, announced the launch of Flux, a new Web3 project. Once the news was announced, it immediately attracted widespread attention. The controversy over the issue of transparency has led to the withdrawal of several investors.

Investment transparency was questioned, and many investors withdrew one after another

On February 4, Ryan Carson announced on Twitter that he would launch a new Web3 project called “Flux” and announced the initial investors, including the well-known NFT collector gmoney, the well-known Meme platform 9GAG founder 9gagceo, and the founder of VeeFriends Gary Vaynerchuk, AvaStars founder j1mmy.eth, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz, WhatStrending founder Shira Lazar, Pio Vincenzo, Vayner Media co-founder AJ Vaynerchuk, J. Fall Group CEO Jeremy Fall, Dr. Doom Von Doom, KOL NFTNick, Devotion founder People andr3w, lib and NFT collector Todd Kramer, the project partners include Immutable, Blur, Ava Labs and more.

According to Ryan Carson, he plans to raise $10 million for Flux through 100 investors, and the minimum investment standard is $160,000. Investors are asking far less than the $160,000 minimum.

However, Ryan Carson’s announcement of this substantial investment list ahead of time without the completion of this part of the financing amount will inevitably arouse FOMO sentiment in the market and will further attract more financing amounts. But this has also misunderstood the outside world. Does the investment standard of Flux require a certain reputation and a minimum of $160,000? Once the remaining 70 investors hit the mark, Flux raised well over $10 million.

In response, Ryan Carson responded that current investors have each pledged to invest between $10,000 and $160,000. Since projects are raising between $10 million and $16 million, and the law limits 100 investors, that means a minimum investment of $160,000.

But a standard practice in fundraising is to use smaller investment amounts early on to attract a small number of investors and later increase the minimum investment amount. So Ryan Carson admitted that he first provided a $10,000 investment line to several friends and quickly got a promise of funds.

Luca Netz, gmoney.9dcc.eth, j1mmy.eth, Shira Lazar, AJ Vaynerchuk, etc., all announced their withdrawal from Flux investment and expressed their dissatisfaction with Ryan Carson’s inconsistent words and deeds and the way he took the opportunity to promote and hype. Luca Netz stated:

“For the sake of transparency, I didn’t sign anything. I didn’t fund anything. I thought I was just helping people in the space and being friendly. I don’t know much about the details, but I’ve made it clear to Ryan that I don’t want to be apart (sic) of this.”

gmoney.9dcc.eth said Ryan did admit to him that the minimum requirement for other investors was $160,000, which was an oversight on his part. It is very common for investors to publicize through PR after the fundraising is completed, but the difference is that these lists are released and hyped before the fundraising is completed.

“I don’t feel comfortable with how this announcement was made before fundraising was complete, and the tactics for fundraising, and thus am no longer committing to the deal. I do wish Ryan the best and hope he crushes it.”

In addition, j1mmy.eth also stated that he was in After listening carefully to Ryan Carson and everyone else, it was decided not to continue investing in Flux. Affected by this, Ryan Carson has now deleted the relevant tweets and closed the Flux official website.

The Flux Genesis Pass, also launched by Flux, claims to adopt a similar script to PROOF, and the rights and interests of the two routes are almost the same, which also makes the project questionable.

Of course, Flux attempts to play the role of an “incubator” to create its own characteristics. While providing investors with 7% equity, it will launch a certain number of projects every year until the tenth year. In the eyes of the encryption community, which is undoubtedly a “flywheel for garbage projects.” In response, Moonbirds and PROOF founder Kevin Rose responded that Ryan Carson did not have a so-called “script” for creating PROOF and hired him after the community launched it.

Personally controversial, its NFT fund suffered serious losses

Before becoming the former Moonbirds COO and co-founder of PROOF, Ryan Carson was the founder of three companies, namely DropSend (acquired in 2008), Carsonified (acquired in 2011), and Treehouse Island (acquired in December 2021) acquisition).

However, Ryan Carson’s multiple entrepreneurs seem to have a lot of black history. In addition to the controversy caused by multiple changes in management policies, when Treehouse was acquired, Ryan Carson fired nearly 90% of the employees without paying severance pay.

The reason why Ryan Carson was able to join PROOF was that he had known Kevin Rose for many years and that he was optimistic about the project after purchasing a PROOF NFT research and applied to Kevin to join as COO. In order to show “sincerity,” Ryan Carson also purchased a PROOF NFT again and obtained 1% of PROOF Holdings shares during PROOF’s tenure.

And Ryan Carson’s many behaviors during his tenure at Moonbirds have also aroused the anger of the community. On the first day of the Moonbirds release, Ryan Carson bought a large number of rare Moonbirds at a relatively low price in the secondary market, which was suspected by the outside world as insider trading.

And he himself responded that he did not buy the rare Moonbirds NFT in violation of the regulations but waited for a long time to buy it (3 hours and 57 minutes after Proof allowed minting and 2 hours and 57 minutes after public minting), and he did not buy a lot.

Not only that, Ryan Carson also announced his withdrawal from Moonbirds in April 2022 and established a new fund, 121G. This news also caused FUD in the community, and the price of Moonbirds also fell.

And Ryan Carson and Moonbirds parted ways behind a conflict of interest, he once revealed Moonbirds and brought any project benefits. However, Ryan Carson also revealed that the launch of the 121G fund was approved by Kevin, provided that the fund is not allowed to obtain any special permission list access rights from Moonbirds and zero solicitation certificate membership policy.

Later, Ryan Carson’s word-of-mouth rebounded because of the 121G fund’s purchase of many Moonbirds. However, during the official launch of 121G, Ryan Carson also exposed the variability of his decision-making and repeatedly lowered the minimum subscription price for investors from the initial $1 million to $10,000.

As a professional NFT fund, 121G Fund aims to ensure participation in future popular NFT projects, customize purchase and holding strategies through cutting-edge information, and purchase a certain proportion of blue-chip NFTs. In addition, the fund is a 506(c) rolling fund, which needs to invest at least 25 Ethereum per quarter and at least 100 Ethereum per year.

Although 121G received an investment commitment of more than 14,000 Ethereum (approximately $40 million) shortly after the announcement, its market investment performance is not optimistic. Of course, this has something to do with the overall bear market.

According to the 2022 Q4 investment portfolio disclosed on the official website of 121G Fund, it includes Moonbirds, Tableland, Proof, MPL, Tigerbob, and Admit One. The highest point in August fell by more than 61.7%. It is worth mentioning that the official @0x95 address shows that the address currently only holds 8 low-value NFTs, and the community has also raised relevant doubts about this.

From this point of view, whether it is Flux or previous entrepreneurial projects, Ryan Carson has always been controversial in maximizing benefits in various ways. Down-to-earth empowerment of NFT projects is the secret to gaining users’ favor and recognition.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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Harold

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