- The potential lawsuit against Eminence creator Andre Cronje by a group calling themselves EMN Investigation has thrown up issues of responsibility in the crypto space
- EMN Investigation members bought a baseless token that was mistakenly released by Eminence creator Cronje
- The opportunistic investors blame Cronje and his team for listing and pushing the token, but the issue reflects a bigger issue of speculative buying
The news that a group of cryptocurrency traders calling themselves EMN Investigation is trying to fund a lawsuit against Yearn.finance founder Andre Cronje over the Eminence debacle has raised questions around responsibility in the crypto space. EMN Investigation blames Cronje for listing the token before it was ready and for pumping it, but this ignores the fact that the responsibility is ultimately with the buyer when it comes to any investment, especially one so obviously speculative as Eminence was.
EMN Investigation Group Blame Yearn Team for Losses
Eminence was a token that was listed on Uniswap last month by Cronje that got hacked just hours afterwards, losing buyers their money. Cronje claims that the token was a test that wasn’t ready for trading, while EMN Investigation investors argue that he and his team knew what they were doing and profited from it.
The EMN Investigation argument holds that Cronje is at fault because he conducted a test on a live network, which resulted in the EMN token finding its way to Uniswap. This gave the impression that the platform behind it was of a sufficient state of readiness that the token was representative of something, when this was not the case at all.
The EMN Investigation group also claims that some of the Yearn.finance team were posting ways in which EMN tokens could be accrued and sold, going further and accusing the team, along with Cronje, of selling EMN tokens once they realized the price was going up.
Six Figure Sums Invested
Stories soon abounded of opportunists investing six figures into the coin only to watch it crash and burn just hours later when a hacker managed to exploit a vulnerability in the smart contract and mint the entire token supply, crashing the price. Then the recriminations began.
In response to the accusations from the EMN Investigation gang, Cronje has argued that he always conducted a similar test and never before has anyone actually bought the token. He also argues, as many in the community have since done, that buying any token, or any asset of any kind, is a case of caveat emptor – interested parties should do their research before buying anything, be it a stock, cryptocurrency, or a household product.
Cronje Not Responsible for Traders’ Actions
There is no doubt that Cronje, as a prominent member of the DeFi community, should have known that speculative plays on Uniswap are often picked up by risk-taking traders, and as such should have avoided a situation where there was any chance for the token to be purchased.
However, putting aside the accusations of team selling by EMN Investigation, Cronje isn’t responsible for others’ actions, and anyone putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into a token that had no product, no website, and no community and who’s only connection to anything tangible was a single tweet on a brand new Twitter account was just asking for trouble.
The fact is that the EMN Investigation traders knew exactly what they were getting into. They will have been more than aware that a Uniswap project has a more than even chance of being a scam from the outset, and that putting even a single cent into a related token is a risk.
Yes, the token shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the reason why the EMN Investigation traders bought in so early was because they thought they were getting into a mystery project on the ground floor. The Cronje link, which was about as tenuous as you can get in the crypto world, was seemingly enough for them to sink money into.
EMN Issue Highlights ‘Degen’ Mentality
Even if it turns out that Cronje and the team purposefully released the token in an attempt to make a quick buck, the EMN Investigation investors still share a heavy portion of the blame because they allowed themselves to be suckered into a completely empty project and facilitated the scam – their greed and lack of investment nous made them perfect foils for such a stunt, if stunt it was.
Anyone who gambles on a brand new, completely baseless token cannot be surprised when their investment goes belly up.
Like all Uniswap traders, the EMN Investigation traders would all have known that the risk of a ‘rug pull’ on a new coin is high – indeed it is almost expected with new projects that launch these days – and this goes double for a coin with as little to back it up as Eminence had.
As the saying goes it takes two to tango, and there were clearly two parties ready and waiting to dance in this case. Cronje may have laid on the music and the dancefloor (either accidentally or intentionally) but the EMN Investigation investors were perfectly happy to whip on their shoes and take to the floor despite having no idea if it was actually even there.
