ZachXBT's "Recollection of Huang Licheng's Cryptocurrency Story" retrospective.

Original Title: "22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)"

Original Author: ZachXBT

Original Source: ZachXBT Medium

Translated by: Advac L., Blocktempo

This morning, "Machi Big Brother" Huang Licheng posted on social media that the on-chain detective ZachXBT had damaged his reputation by publishing an article "22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)" a year ago. Huang has filed a defamation lawsuit against ZachXBT in the Western District Court of Texas, USA.

Time goes back a year ago, on June 16, 2022, the on-chain detective and well-known KOL ZachXBT published a long article analyzing and exposing his suspicion that Maji Dage is related to more than 10 rug pull projects, and he presented the evidence he collected.

Later, Big Brother Maji commented on Twitter and clarified that ZachXBT's disclosure was incorrect information:

"This is incorrect information. If he were not anonymous, I would sue him for defamation!"

Following is the complete Chinese version of ZachXBT's investigation report.

Short Introduction

黄立成 (Jeffrey Huang), also known as Machi Big Brother, is a former musician and tech entrepreneur who, in 2018, misappropriated 22,000 ETH from Formosa Financial. In the four years since Formosa Financial's collapse, Jeff has launched over ten pump and dump tokens and NFT projects in the cryptocurrency space. The following will provide an overview of Machi Big Brother's activities in the crypto industry, a brief summary of Formosa, his subsequent projects, other participants in these projects, and, as always, evidence to support these claims.

In the past year, "Ma Ji Da Ge" (also known as Jeff Huang) has become famous in the NFT field as one of the largest holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). However, few people know about his dark history in the cryptocurrency industry...

Background

黄立成, also known as "Big Brother Maji", is a former rapper and technology entrepreneur. In 1991, Huang founded the popular/rap trio LA Boyz and became its founding member, gaining great fame. LA Boyz was active from the early to late 1990s, releasing 13 albums and becoming popular in Asia, before finally disbanding in 1997.

After achieving success with LA Boyz, Huang Licheng founded the hip-hop group "Machi" in 2003 and achieved success once again. MACHI Entertainment is one of the largest hip-hop/rap record companies in Asia and is a subsidiary of "Warner Music Taiwan" founded by Huang Licheng and his partners. Eventually, with the establishment of 17 Media (M17), the parent company of 17 Live, Huang Licheng transitioned from the music industry to the technology industry. M17 was founded in 2015 and has since become one of the most popular live streaming apps in Asia.

In 2017, Huang Licheng and Mithril entered the cryptocurrency field, which was the first of his series of questionable projects. The team members of these projects were unclear and morally questionable, and they used consistent, mechanical methods to drive up prices and sell off. Let's delve into it.

Project One: Mithril (MITH)

In late 2017, Ma Ji, the founder of Mithril, created a decentralized social media platform called Mithril. The platform aims to directly reward content creators through its native token, MITH. In February 21, 2018, Mithril conducted a private token sale and raised a total of $51.6 million (60,000 ETH), which accounted for 30% of the total token supply. In February 2018, 70% of these private tokens were unlocked during the TGE, and the remaining 30% were unlocked in the following three months. In April 2018, Mithril was listed on the centralized exchange platform Bithumb. By May 2018, the fully unlocked MITH tokens accounted for 89% of the total circulating supply, which caused significant selling pressure afterwards.

  Image source: Binance Research

  Mithril team

Project 2: Formosa Financial

Since the beginning of 2018, Huang Licheng has been working closely with George Hsieh, Czhang Lin, and Ryan Terribilini to establish Bao Dao Financial, a treasury management platform for blockchain companies. In the last week of April 2018, Bao Dao Financial completed its angel round of financing, raising a total of 22,000 ETH. The private round of sales ended on May 31, raising an additional 22,000 ETH. These tokens sold account for 30% of the total supply. Bao Dao Financial raised a total of $23 million (44,000 ETH), with participation from well-known investors including Binance, QCP Capital, Lemnis Cap, Block One, Metaverse/Huang Licheng (remember this), Maicoin, Wilson Huang, Leo Cheng's Syndicate, Blockstate, and Block One.  

Equity distribution ratio

Formosa Team

Investors are being marketed the Token with the promise that FMF will be quickly listed on top cryptocurrency exchanges.

Deleted Medium Article Excerpt

Excerpt: Token allocation for potential investors in the white paper

Hinting at being listed on Binance

Brother Maji denies it afterwards

FMF was launched on the decentralized trading platform IDEX in June 2018, but immediately experienced a sharp decline. It wasn't until September 2018 that it was listed on centralized exchanges such as IDEX and UEX.

FMF Token trading on IDEX exchange platform

Meanwhile, 17 Media had planned to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on June 7, 2018. However, due to unspecified settlement issues with investors, the IPO was postponed after failing to raise the targeted $115 million. ZachXBT contacted an anonymous source to uncover the reason behind this.

"The suspension of M17's trading and its current private entity status are not related to regulatory or Citibank's mistakes."

  2018/06/22 Share Repurchase

Breadcrumbs chart, created by ZachXBT

As for Huang Licheng, he did not move the 11,000 ETH he extracted from his wallet for a period of time, until the end of June and early July when he transferred 4,980 ETH, 1997 ETH, 1,400 ETH, 500 ETH, and 103 ETH to various Binance accounts. Among them, 2,000 ETH was sent to czhang.eth and 20 ETH was allocated to an EOA wallet.

The problem still exists: Who does the Binance account and wallet belong to? Let's take a closer look and carefully examine some of the ETH outflows!

1. From July 26th to July 29th, 2018, 4980 ETH was transferred out: records show that this Binance account often receives transfers from two sources: FTX and littlebang.eth.

a) If we search for the owner of littlebang.eth on OpenSea, we will see that their username is "Bun919tw".

Excerpt from Cream Finance Medium article

b) The search results displayed by Google for "bun919tw" actually refer to Bun Hsu, a core engineer at Cream Finance (Cream being another project by Huang Licheng).   

c) Bun Hsu's Twitter profile picture is Bored Ape Yacht Club #7066, which was gifted to him by machibigbrother.eth (Jeff's public wallet).

d) Bun Hsu also happened to trade multiple Jeff projects, such as FMF, SWAG, CREAM, SQUID, PHOON, MCX, and MIS/MIC.

Why did someone who is not part of the Baodao Finance team receive 4,980 ETH just 3 weeks after IC0, and also trade for tokens from other projects of the Mahjong Brothers and receive a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) from one of the Mahjong Brothers?

2. On July 11, 2018, 2,000 ETH was leaked: According to blockchain records, the transaction was received by czhang.eth (Czhang Lin). Mr. Lin served as an advisor at Baodao Financial until June 22.

3.  1,997 ETH flowed out on July 28, 2018: The only funds that flowed into this Binance account came from harrisonhuang.eth, which frequently interacts with w9g.eth (Wilson Huang), the Vice President of Engineering at Mithril and founder of XY Finance and GalaXY Kats.

Wilson sends NFT to Harrison

a) For quick Twitter search of harrisonhuang.eth, we can speculate that this is his Twitter account, as he posted his ENS address on Twitter in response to Wilson.

On July 26, 2018, Huang Licheng and Mi Yin were caught attempting to cheat in the Binance monthly community coin vote. A user named Lucky discovered evidence that Mi Yin received over 80,000 votes, which were supported by only two to three addresses.

The community coin voting function works like this: 1 BNB equals 1 vote, and each account is allowed to hold a maximum of 500 BNB/votes. Therefore, a voter can hold a maximum of 500 votes by holding 500 BNB. However, in the rules, Binance states that if fake accounts are created and BNB is distributed in large quantities, the eligibility for the competition will be automatically cancelled.

During the secret silver operation, Huang Licheng used the same address that is closely related to Baodao Financial IC0, which holds MITH worth $8.6 million. The following image shows a wallet that transferred BNB in bulk and received ETH as gas from the wallet of the largest whale in Secret Silver at that time.

Mithril's Breadcrumbs address flow chart, created by ZachXBT

1b) At 4:43 AM (UTC) on July 28th, 43.8k BNB (approximately Bun) was withdrawn from Binance.

2a) On the morning of July 28th at 7:08, 1994 ETH was deposited into Harrison Huang's Binance account.

2b) On the morning of July 28th at 7:28 (UTC), 30,000 BNB was withdrawn from Binance.

Once again, these addresses are associated with Huang Licheng/Mi Yin. Unfortunately, this is most likely where a significant portion of Baodao Financial's funds are flowing to.

Mithril has won the vote.

Filter out so-called abnormal ticket numbers on Binance.

Once again, this is the use of funds from Treasure Island Finance.

This is where they flow to:

In the autumn of 2018, when communication with Huang Licheng, Czhang, and other key members of the FMF team became increasingly distant and no proper explanation or project updates were given, token holders began to suspect that something was wrong. FMF continued to plummet, and the sudden abandonment of key team members left the project in a difficult situation.

Wash Trading Bots on IDCM

Project 3: Machi X

Price performance. Image source: Coingecko

I contacted multiple VCs and angels who invested in the project to better understand why they did not take legal action against Huang Licheng and Xie Guoliang. This is mainly due to the fact that Huang Licheng and Xie Guoliang are seen as powerful figures in Taiwan, and the investors I spoke with are concerned about what might happen if they speak out. Others simply do not want to deal with the mess because it happened in multiple jurisdictions. Everyone agrees that they just want to forget that it even happened in the first place.

Project Four: Cream Finance

Project Five: Wifey Finance

2020/8/8 Created Smart Contract

麻吉大哥地址是最早交易的地址之一

translates to:

The address of Maji Big Brother is one of the earliest trading addresses.

Machi is one of the earliest members to join Discord.

Wilson Huang received funds sent by Wifey Deployer

Since August 7th, 2020, there have been no posts or activities in Discord. Wifey has a lifespan of 5 days.

Project 6: Swag Finance

Swag Controversy

挖卖砸

Translation:

挖卖砸

Swag has been delisted from Cream, 1.5 months after its release on Token.

Project 7: Mith Cash

On December 30, 2020, Huang Licheng and Mithril returned with a new project: Mith Cash, a fork of the Basis Cash protocol. Just a few days after its launch, Mith Cash's total value locked (TVL) grew to $1 billion, but the price plummeted as token holders cashed in their rewards. Mith Cash ultimately suffered the same fate as Basis Cash. Similar to Huang Licheng's other projects, the team behind Mith Cash is "anonymous," and Huang Licheng claims to be only an advisor.

MITH Cash Token price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

Project 8: Typhoon Cash

Shortly after the collapse and burning of Mith Cash, the buddy boss returned with the Tornado Cash fork project Typhoon Cash. The Typhoon team claims to have an anonymous team, but it is well known that Huang Licheng and his friends are the masterminds behind Typhoon. It was obvious that the development was hasty at the time of release. Anyone can pledge and remain anonymous in the anonymous pool, but to receive rewards, they must pledge in the pool. This means that in order to receive rewards, your reward deposit will be doxxed, making the concept of anonymous coins worthless. In the weeks after mining began, the project was abandoned and members who left the Telegram and Discord channels destroyed it.

Rewkang is one of the first five members of the Telegram group.

Typhoon Cash vulnerability exposed by Avner and verified by Nick.

Example:

Under the recipient, the withdrawal address is the address where funds are withdrawn.

Cancel the pledge and withdraw from the second address.

Since February 2021, there have been no updates posted on Discord, Telegram, or Twitter, and people are once again left in the dark.

Project 9: Mud Games

With the sudden popularity of Loot for Adventurers (random in-game assets stored on the chain) at the end of August 2021, Ma Ji Big Brother quickly forked his own version, named Heroes of Evermore, which soon earned an anonymous team a profit of 533.92 ETH. Unlike Loot, the heroes in Evermore are not random. The anonymous team members quietly minted all the rarest NFTs in the series, and Evermore holders are unaware of this.   

Team members Jeff and Penguin have both minted rare NFT collections #2 and #3

Project 10: Squid DAO

Once again, an "anonymous team" supported the launch of the game Squid DAO, which is a branch of OHM/Nouns DAO and appeared in October 2021. Early holders included MachiBigBrother.eth. In January 2022, the project was closed on Machi's suggestion.

Machi strongly passed the governance proposal voting

Nowadays, Big Brother Ma has moved to X, XY Finance, and his latest fork: Ape Finance.

XY Finance's team and advisors

X Advisors

Ape Finance

In many of Huang Licheng's projects, we see the same recurring themes: anonymous teams, forked projects, new wallets funded through FTX, and shorter lifecycles. We see the same players in each project, with Wilson and/or Leo always hanging out with the big brother. Even VCs like Andrew Kang turn a blind eye. I contacted Andrew in October 2021 and this is what he had to say:

YFI founder Andrew Kang

Then in February, Andrew once again expressed his support to Huang Licheng, even though at this point, Cream was almost dead. Unfortunately, when it comes to money, people turn a blind eye to obvious red flags, especially when parties involved have caused economic harm to others through over 10 low-effort projects or by aiding in the misappropriation of 22,000 ETH.  

The image is from the PleasrDAO Telegram group.

To be polite, I contacted Huang Licheng before publishing this article. He emphasized that he only received compensation for serving as an advisor at Baodao Finance, claiming that he did not know about the payment of 4980 ETH to Bun or Harrison, and he insisted that he never cheated in the community coin competition. I believe there are too many coincidences between all of these projects, it cannot be like this.

Original article link

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