Part of the journey of being a Web3 user is the discovery aspect; The little nuts you can't learn but you can live alone. While I'm all for decentralized finance and all it stands for, my journey has led me to two interesting experiences that I'd like to share with the community.
This first article will cover my experience with the PUSHD Web3 project. TLDR: I bought PUSHD tokens in the system but to “receive”, I have to enter my recovery secret phrase ???? Is it weird? Read on to find out.
Part of winning the crypto game is knowledge and for that it is crucial to know which projects are in their early stage (ideally seed stage or pre-sale). That said, I'm always looking for projects like this, and in that search, I came across PUSHD.
PUSHD is essentially a marketplace and will be the Web3 version of eBay. There's nothing too fancy or particularly innovative here, but overall it's one of the best startup projects I've come across on Reddit.
My investment “returns” – 2.5 times in 3 months.
On January 19, 2024 I invested about $100 USD from SHIB in the project and received a total of 1769 PUSHD tokens. Reference to the transaction below.
At the time of writing, 1769 PUSHD tokens are now worth $254.76 USD. So 2.5 times back in 3 months. Not bad at all!
Conducting Investor Due Diligence – 3 Green Flags
✅ Public Relations and Communications
As with any investment, due diligence (DD) should be done, so a quick Google search for 'PUSHD Crypto' will turn up some pretty impressive results.
For the majority of the population, seeing such results would demand approval. As for validation, at least 20 crypto-related media publications validate their existence, so with so many “supporters”, I conclude that this is a “green flag” on the project. Moreover, the publication dates of all these articles are recent, increasing the legitimacy of the project.
✅ Coinbase profile page
Another DD check I did was to check their CEX (Centralized Exchange) token profiles etc. While I couldn't find them on the Coinbase exchange itself (mainly because they're still in the “seed” stage), I could find a page. In the Coinbase Wallet app. Being the most regulated platform, if Coinbase accepts it, it also gets my seal of approval.
✅ UI and UX of the website, ease of purchase.
During the whole DD process, I would say the thing I enjoyed the most was exploring their website. It's in crypto, this underlying topic called “Chain Abstraction”. TLDR means making the process of interacting with crypto so simple and error-free that even novices will find it easy to participate. This would come by moving (or abstracting) the chain away from the process, so theoretically, users could get all the benefits of Web3 without having to deal with their own complexities (bridges, DEXs, etc.)
With the PUSHD website, the whole process of distributing my tokens was seamless and easy. I have attached some screenshots below in this order,
- Main website
- Dashboard
- Buy tokens
- Transactions (With proof of my $100 investment)
Overall, the process was pretty smooth. I transferred some leftover SHIB to a wallet, and in less than 10 minutes, the transaction number and all other relevant details were reflected on my purchase dashboard.
Conducting Investor Due Diligence – 3 Red Flags
❌ Social media presence + NO product proof.
When doing my DD on their social media platforms, what I want to see are signs of growing communities and users shouting the product's praises. While metrics like follower count are important, the focus would be on community interaction and engagement.
I looked into their social media following and here are some of my thoughts,
- ✅ Telegram – Telegram does the verification. They have 4 telegram channels (the largest has 62k members @pushdbot) all of them are active. Their Telegram admin is also on it (as you'll see later), so Telegram verifies it.
- ❌ Twitter – Twitter is the problem. With only 3,000 followers, the first big inconsistency is the difference between twitter and telegram followers. Not a major red flag, but an inconsistency nonetheless. We can let it slide. What horrified me more was the content posted on Twitter.
- ❌ Reddit – MAJOR Red Flag, will explain more below.
❌ Twitter content – No product proof
The problem with their Twitter account is that there are no product demos or screenshots. For any project, if they're walking around with a fancy deck that has no real proof of the product's existence, this is a major red flag to me. Reference screenshots below where all their posts were about investing. However, given that their project is still in the BEGINNING phase, could the lack of product proof be something that can be overlooked? Depending on your investment appetite, DD may ask for more, but for my mere $100 investment, I can forget it.
❌ Reddit – Scam Warnings!!!
Let's put it this way, for any honest project, the moment communities associate your project with even the tiniest of “cheating” thoughts, the project is probably dead in the water. The only reason investors would continue to invest in the project would probably be out of greed or hope. A quick search in the land where #NFW became popular brought up several threads of users questioning the legitimacy of the project.
Despite such doubts, they are small and do not seem to be very “loud” or “active”. Assuming these users are victims of this “scam”, they don't seem very concerned about the situation, and so again, I have to ignore this.
Is PUSHD A Scam?
Note, even now, that I refer to this “scam” in inverted commas, I have not been scammed. I'm not willing to take the “last step” for the project to actually be a scam. That's right, here we go, this is the good part.
Sequence of Events
1. The tokens are in my dashboard (as per the screenshot above), but the tokens were not included in my Coinbase ERC-20 wallet.
2. I contacted Telegram Customer Service who sent me this.
3. Enjoy
now what
The conversation ended there, leaving him stuck in limbo. Of course I would NEVER APPEAR the phrase to retrieve my SECRET, and NOR SHOULD YOU.
The word SECRET is in the SECRET RECOVERY PHRASE for a reason. To all web3 users old, new, future, NEVER EVER READ this or you'll miss out on everything.
Brian
Although my $100 has already been transferred to the PUSHD project team, it's fair to say that I lost it and will never get it back. But until I'm 100% sure that this project is closed, it's not even fair for me to say that I've been completely scammed. Lots of variables here but one constant again, you should NEVER REVEAL YOUR SECRET RECOVERY PHRASE.
Want to learn more about Crypto? Worried potential scams? AK will share the lessons he wished he knew before investing in cryptocurrencies, the trends he's watching out for, and how he's managing his cryptocurrency portfolio in 2024. Join him to learn more!
