Substratum, the decentralized internet protocol that daytraded its ICO funds while its CEO bought a $400,000 house, has been handed over to the community to try and revamp the troubled project.
Two and a half years of financial mismanagement have led to Substratum being run into the ground, forcing the remaining developers to fork the project and move it to a new blockchain in the hopes of realizing its goals.
Substratum Moves to MASQ
Substraum’s fork and the move to a community-driven project was announced by crypto analyst Brian Li, the author of a damning investigation into Substratum’s financial affairs in January last year:
By the way, the #Substratum community has forked the project to @MASQ_ai, and development will continue thanks to volunteers. Since the beginning, my issue with #SUB was it’s incompetent CEO @overridepro. Now that Tabb is not a problem anymore, things are looking a lot better.
— Brian Li (@bwhli) October 22, 2019
The Substratum code has been forked and moved over to MASQ, a community-driven blockchain that focuses on “providing people around the world access to a censorship-free Internet”. This has the unfortunate side effect of confirming that all SUB tokens, which hit $3.13 in January 2018, are now completely worthless, although this has in essence been the case for months, if not years.
Years of Financial Mismanagement
Tabb caused a stir in 2018 when he casually announced in a since-deleted YouTube video that he had given an in-house daytrader some ETH from the company’s ICO funds to trade with, which rang alarm bells with the community that it was resorting to such measures in order to raise cash.
What made that situation worse was that the trader in question was shorting ETH at its then position of $95, telling Tabb he thought it would drop to $60. In fact, the price never got lower than $86, and only ever increased following the video, exacerbating the project’s financial difficulties.
Li’s January 2019 report on Substratum looked into some of the dodgy financial dealings within the company, such as missing ICO funds, which may have had a hand in Binance delisting the token the following month. This more or less rang the death knell for Substratum, with 2019 seeing its situation go from bad to worse, leading to one of the lead developers saying in September that the project had “reached the end of its funding”.
Substratum Gets a Second Life
This left developers and the community little do but either walk away or start again, and they have chosen the latter. Hopefully with the financial burden removed and a supportive community behind it, Substratum can now flourish and achieve the increasingly important goal of a decentralized internet.
