Binance Smart Chain went live on Sep 2020. In a month, the BSC has invited many projects into its environment, though not all came with good intentions. People need a safe place to trade, hence in Oct 2020, Nyanswop was launched. However, with what has happened over the past half a year, we are not able to continue developing the project and would be ending our support gradually over time.
We have remained a passive and quiet team for most of the time, as we really want to keep peace and cooperation in BSC as much as possible. But now would be a good time to give our full story of the things that have happened and we hope that future projects (and even users) are able to take some benefit from our experience here.
A Rough Start and The Crypto Social Media Effect
We started Nyanswop during the time when there were lots of rugs in BSC. We forked Uniswap despite it being complicated, but we still chose it because of its authenticity in the Ethereum chain.
There were many short-lived (and scam/rugged) projects launched at that time which actually achieved high TVL. But for Nyanswop, instead of having tons of people joining the protocol, we get ‘influencers’ spreading FUD on us.
Despite our contracts being verified, we received negativity because of how we chose to handle our communication channels. Our team is a small one and we chose to have socials on Twitter and Medium — because that was what we could manage.
But a single factor like not having a Telegram account or maybe not enough was enough for some users to spread negative news instead of focusing on more important factors.
Our initial growth was really impacted back then, which was a factor that kept the interest around Nyanswop small while still getting FUDs over time.
There were other projects that ended within days or weeks, and they don’t get as much FUD despite having weird protocols and some turning out to be scams.
These things make us wonder about “influencers” in the crypto social media space and their intentions.
Influencers who own a lot of influence should be more responsible for their actions. Unfortunately many (not all) are just paid: paid to shill, and some even paid to FUD. A simple tweet from people with influence can alter the opinion of the public, so please BSC users — be more mindful before sharing thoughts online. Remember that not all projects have teams that are able to communicate as fast and proper (we all come from different parts of the world that might not be great with English).
Yes, we all have our freedom of speech, but we believe freedom carries responsibilities as well. Many don’t realise it but a big strength or weakness to any new developing chain are these users who publish their thoughts. It is hard to tell who wants the best for everyone and who only wants the best for their profit, but it should be something that users need to learn to tell the difference.
This space is not a winner-takes-all kind of space. There is so much space for the blockchain industry to expand, we can all grow together and help each other. Since Nyanswop started, we’ve always been very open about our opinion on the BSC, and that is to bring projects together and grow together as well as help users learn more about the blockchain.
6 months later, that has not changed. We’ve always done our best to reach out to other teams and educate users along the way.
The Full Story Of Nyanswop
Over time, we’ve met really good people, but that also includes unforeseen challenges and unfairness. Here’s a roundup of the things, good and bad, that have occurred from the side of the development team.
Our Launchpool — Nyanchpool
To help BSC projects grow, we launched ‘Nyanchpool’, our version of a launch pool. Since the start, we’ve been giving out more benefits to the participating projects compared to the benefits we receive for ourselves.
We hoped that projects would get publicity and also a good distribution of their tokens. We would exchange tokens and then in turn, we could all grow together. But.. that met us with the first unpleasant encounter.
1,000,000 NYA Lost
We’ve been keeping this to ourselves until now.
One of the projects we collaborated with for the Nyanchpool, didn’t distribute the NYA tokens to the users of their projects as it was agreed upon.
Instead, they sold off the 1M NYA tokens. Until today, we cannot understand the logic behind their decision to do so, or why they would have the right to go against an agreement without discussing it with us beforehand.
This particular project was formerly known as Thugs (now rebranded into HyperJump).
On Nyanswop, we distributed all the NYA in our pool to the DRUGS holders back in Nov 2020 as agreed. But we learned that our 1 million NYA tokens weren’t distributed to the users of their platform.
After 2 months of not seeing our tokens getting distributed, we pinged Thugs’ (former member) 8ball about it only to find out that they sold all 1 million NYA in early Dec 2020 without any notice to our team.
Here are the transactions as proof:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0xcef0e3c89022a2d8f748950f2035f47b810c4ae32075634782c70dace4896045
https://bscscan.com/tx/0xada3d147514a9040476a2feb6e74bb4d33a31c81a4479974c3f103168d9eb5bc
The counter argument given by 8ball was that the amount of NYA traded was worth much lesser than the DRUGS given. That’s not true.
At the start of the trade (early Nov 2020), the value of both amounts of tokens were worth $1000, and during the conversations through Dec 2020 with 8ball, both tokens traded are still worth $1000.
Also, it is natural that prices would change over time, so it’s totally illogical to always assume that the tokens would be equal in value over time. That’s why agreements are made at a certain point and carried out as planned. If the tokens are not distributed over time, the total value (in USD) would definitely change.
We question why they would just dump 5% of our circulating supply against an agreement and without consulting us in order to be unethical. If we did not ask them directly, we would not have known this has happened either.
These tokens were supposed to be given to the Thugs’ users which technically meant these gains were taken away from the users. As users of their platform, you could have received our tokens back then, but you didn’t, because the platform sold them for themselves.
Despite finding this in Dec 2020, we didn’t call them out as we believe in finding a solution rather than causing more problems.
We continued to communicate with 8ball for an ideal solution. It was proposed that they would return the 1M NYA or 29 BNB (amount sold) back to us. But the negotiation went on for 2 months without any actions. This delayed our feature releases because we didn’t want the NYA price to change too much so as to not affect the return.
Despite trying to do what we can on our side, we eventually didn’t get a response. Over time, 8ball left the Thugs team very abruptly. And though the new Thugs team rebranded into HyperJump was notified about this, there has been no follow up at all on our situation.
You might argue that these amounts are small, but for a small project and team — every part of these collaborations and project spendings are vital to us. Our silence and passive approach was taken advantage of.
But still, we chose to keep things private and kept thinking the best for them, but obviously we didn’t get the same response.
It is our hope that as BSC grows, projects understand that what might mean very little to you might mean a very different thing to another team. Ethics and agreements are the most valuable asset here in the cryptocurrency space. Unfortunately, this might be valued differently to different teams.
Nyanswop Fortune
One of the first few unique features was the concept of Fortune Telling. In this stressful space, we figured that it would be good to bring some fun to everyone and utilize NFT tokens at the same time.
Our bigger plan was to make the Nyanswop Fortune usable across multiple projects, as a ‘luck’ factor. Unfortunately that didn’t turn out the way we wanted as most projects would prefer to use their own products.
Despite things not working out the way we would hope, we’ve received many positive responses from the users and we’re very thankful for that. We’re glad that this feature has brought some happiness to your days.
NFT Oracle
BSC turns out to be the ideal blockchain for NFT due to its fast and cheap blocking mechanism. We saw an issue that the creator doesn’t get benefits much like ‘royalties’ outside the blockchain world.
So we did an innovative NFT oracle. The aim was to store the original creator address for all the NFTs so that marketplaces could choose to give the original creator a portion of the fees generated.
But like chainlink, there needs to be sponsorships as we can’t probably upload all NFT data in BSC ourselves, that would cost too much. Despite speaking to almost every NFT projects in BSC, none seems to be interested. The reason is likely due to the fact that a small fee (or gas) is needed.
With no one to push for this ideal NFT world, original creators would not get the well deserved credits.
We still believe that this could provide a lot of value to the creators. Hopefully one day BSC would have such a decentralized solution to provide royalties to the creators.
Nya Cash
The Nya Cash was to push NYA token value as it includes buyback mechanisms. And it actually worked out very very well. Nyanswop was building a great TVL momentum during the alt season and it would continue on into Nya Cash.
But that unfortunately didn’t work out due to the protocol getting exploited. This was not expected. We would like to emphasize again that the team has not gained any benefits. Instead, we have tried our best to pivot every plan we have to repair the situation.
To the exploiter:
We cannot understand why someone who has contributed to open source repositories or the arctic code vault would think that exploiting a protocol is fine. Isn’t it very contradicting ?
Yes, perhaps you’re not aware about this, but many people already know who you are. Your personal details are also with us. Do understand that it is not only our team that you have affected, but many users who have invested into it. Some of these have been able to secure enough details to pinpoint the actions to you.
We always believe in peace first, so this is our statement that if you ever want to return the exploited gains, do send them back to the Nyanswop Deployer and we will redistribute them to the users.
Here are the exploited transaction for reference:
https://bscscan.com/tx/0x8b0517f1f38a457def1dc7e75de6c6b665e994756794485cc3c0f8b000ac0cd9
Concluding Nyanswop
BSC is now about 7 months old. Some projects have proven to be legit and honest. One such project is PancakeSwap. With such a trustworthy AMM project available, Nyanswop is no longer serving its initial intention.
At this point, we have decided to stop building new features for Nyanswop, and head for a closure. We will burn off all the NYA tokens in all of our addresses (including Treasury).
We will keep all the sites running for 3 months and the telegram communication support for 1 week. Thereafter, the telegram would be switched to an announcement-only channel to provide helpful links.
Telegram support: Mar 24 — Mar 31
Site running: Till June 2021
This is definitely not what we intended to do when we begun our journey here on BSC. Our goals were to create proper, safe and an educational place for users to invest and learn about cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately, there is only so many heavy hits that a team can take before its code and developers break.
It is with a heavy heart that we write this. Thank you for your support over the past 6 months everyone. We hope that you continue your journeys in BSC safe and well.
— Nya-chan
