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Jun 18 2018

Skycoin Team Status Update

As many skycoin holders are no doubt aware, there was a major selloff over the past two weeks, in the course of which market price levels for skycoin fell significantly. While multiple factors likely contributed to these events, recent events connected to the China marketing team have also had an impact. This impact was in part direct, but in part due to uncertainty caused by these events. In response, steps have been taken to rectify the situation and eliminate any further negative impact on the market. At the same time, this update will hopefully help to dispel the rumors and clarify the actual limited impact on the project.

The trigger for the events was the discovery that the previous Skycoin China marketing team (EVOLAB) had embezzled approximately 100,000 skycoins over the course of the past half year. In light of this discovery and their failure to return or account for the embezzled coins, the relationship with this team was terminated.

Following this, at 9:30 PM on June 12th 2018, nine individuals, including/led by marketing team members Sam Sing Fong, Mary Li (李臻/李敏), Xiangdong Yan (闫向东) and Jesse Sun Fei (孙飞) burglarized Synth’s home. They proceeded to hold Synth and his wife against their will for 6 hours, over the course of which they threatened, beat and robbed them. Thanks to wallet security measures, the group was only able to extract 18.88 Bitcoin and 6466 skycoins during the robbery. The gang also attempted and failed to steal the design framework for the skycoin ecosystem.

The stolen skycoin transaction can be seen here:

The total number of skycoins stolen by these individuals is still being determined, and the addresses containing stolen coins are also being documented. In order to protect the interests of skycoin holders, as a response to these events a temporary black-listing function was implemented. The future use of this function will be subject to discussion and voting by the entire skycoin community over the next few months.

The primary skycoin exchanges were notified asking them to temporarily freeze the accounts of the criminal suspects. Frozen assets will be dealt with after the investigation has been concluded. The skycoin legal team will supply an update on the aftermath of the armed robbery at a later time.

Since some of the community social media accounts or Telegram groups were created by the EVOLAB team, Skycoin community members wishing to stay connected should subscribe to the groups mentioned on the Skycoin website (www.skycoin.com).

According to feedback from exchanges, the accounts holding stolen skycoins have been frozen, so any further impact on the market should be limited. Though some panic selling seems to be continuing, as of this writing the market price has recovered by approximately 30%.

The following channels are considered official:

  • Skycoin Global Community Telegram: https://t.me/Skycoin
  • Skycoin China Community Telegram: https://t.me/skycoinchina
  • Skycoin China Community WeChat account: skycoin-china
  • Skycoin China Community WeChat public account: skycoin666

Skycoin Website: http://www.skycoin.com

The entire Skycoin team is working with relevant parties to deal with these events and put them behind us. The above incidents have both directly and indirectly impacted the market, and for that we sincerely apologize to our community. We are working hard to ensure that this does not slow our progress as we continue to develop the project