Freeway, a UK-based crypto platform that promised annual returns of up to 43%, halted withdrawals on Sunday, according to a notice posted on the company’s website. Freeway’s native cryptocurrency, which goes by the FWT ticker, fell 74% after the announcement, and to top it all off, Freeway’s website appears to be erasing the names and photos of some executives.
Upset users took to the community channel Telegram to highway, expressing his frustration at not being able to access his accounts. People who told friends and family members to invest in the platform seemed the most angry, according to comments seen by Gizmodo early Monday.
The news, first reported by the crypto-watcher’s Twitter account FatManTerracomes on the heels of other high-profile collapses in the crypto space this year, including Celsius, which has filed for bankruptcy. FatManTerra tweeted on Saturday that they believe Freeway is a Ponzi scheme that will likely collapse by then. Next year.
Well, apparently we didn’t have to wait an entire year for things to fall apart. This appears to have happened in just one day, as Freeway’s website includes a diverse assortment of confusing terms to explain why users can no longer access their money. And that sounds a lot like what Celsius said after announcing it was stopping withdrawals in June.
“As you all know, there has been unprecedented volatility in the forex and cryptocurrency markets lately,” the note on Freeway’s website notes. said.
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“Freeway has therefore decided to diversify its asset base to manage exposure to future market fluctuations and volatility, thereby ensuring the long-term sustainability and profitability of the Freeway ecosystem. This will allow Freeway to maintain the highest level of Supercharger simulation rewards,” the note continues.
What the heck are Supercharger sim rewards? A YouTube video titled “Highway Superchargers Explained“, shows how users can get an amazing rate of return by donating money to Freeway, ranging from 10% for buying the native token to 43% in staking returns. But it’s unclear how to give Freeway this currency actually generated such incredible profit for the users. Funnily enough, the users could also “stake” gold, earning a return. It is also unclear how this was supposed to work.
Freeway handled a value of around $160 million, according to its website, although this claim could not be independently verified. There is nothing on the website that explains how any type of service has been offered by Freeway beyond turning crypto into more crypto. And while it might sound great to be paid a ton of money for doing nothing, that’s usually not how real value is created in the world.
“We built it to create benefits and rewards for people and I want to see those people benefit from it and be rewarded,” Graham Doggart, one of Freeway’s founders, said in a typical video explanation. posted on the company’s YouTube channel.
Despite posting dozens of videos on YouTube, every explanation of Freeway seems to talk about the platform as some kind of big money-making machine without actually explaining the mechanism that allows it to work. And incredibly, no matter how good or bad the general crypto market is, you’re still going to make money, according to Freeway’s promo videos.
“No matter if the market goes up or down, you always get a little more of what we already have,” said Matt Spangard, CTO of Freeway, in a video from July 12, 2021.
“The market dips, when it goes back up you have more than you started with, so you’re much better off than if it was in a traditional account somewhere or even offline,” Spangard continued.
Freeway executives call it “social finance,” which is described in equally opaque terms.
“Social finance is a concept where money, or finance, is executed in a way that benefits everyone connected to it,” said Sadie Hutton, founder and co-CEO, in a YouTube video without elaborate on what the heck that means.
One of Freeway’s claims to fame was winning an award for “2022 Staking Platform of the Year” at a conference called AIBC Asia in Dubai, where it competed against companies that included Celsius, According to a video posted on Vimeo featuring a man named Martyn Richard, nicknamed Chief Brand Officer.
The Internet Archive return machine shows that eight people were on the company’s homepage since last month. The site lists Sadie Hutton as Founder and Co-CEO, Graham Doggart as Founder and Co-CEO, and Peter Neilson as Founder and Director, along with many others. But Freeway’s website currently doesn’t list anyone as attached to the project.
A YouTube video posted in July 2021 shows many additional faces attached to the project that are not included in the roundup of key executives listed on the website last month.
Hutton, Doggart and Spangard did not immediately respond to emailed questions early Monday, and the announcement on Freeway’s website did not clear up the confusion. The company is positioning the withdrawal shutdown as a temporary thing, promising to update its community later.
While this process is ongoing, Freeway will allocate capital to its underlying portfolio, which means that for a temporary period, we will not be buying simulations of Supercharger until our new strategies are implemented.
We will let you know when we are ready to restart partial Supercharger simulation purchases (redemptions) and then again as we can restart full Supercharger simulation purchases as well as deposits and purchases on the Freeway Token (FWT) platform. ).
As we complete this process, we cannot comment further than this statement.
We look forward to updating you later.
Freeway’s website explained that the company was working on something called the Freeway Spending Account, including a “virtual debit card” in the future.
Judging from the Freeway YouTube channel, it looks like the Freeway project actually started out as something called AuBit, which posted its first video on October 16, 2020. Sadie Hutton appears in the video talking about “Freeway tokens,” saying they built their project for three years “on the sly” before announcing it to the world.
“We did a private sale of our AuBit One security tokens – it’s not something that’s available for retail sale, so we’re not promoting or publishing it – but we did in fact sell… we’ve sold nearly two million dollars of AuBit One now,” Hutton claims in the video.
This video only has 223 views on YouTube at the time of this writing and you can see an evolution over 2021 moving away from the AuBit brand to more prominently talking about Freeway. AuBit.io website currently redirects to Freeway website, although old videos on Vimeo appear to show executives for something called AuBit Prime, including Sotirios Botsios, who is listed as CTO and Sotiris Probonas, listed as CEO.
Some in the Telegram chat for Freeway Monday asked why crypto influencer Coach K had deleted old tweets promotion of the highway.
“I think the answer to that is obvious,” one user replied.
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