Bubblemaps: The DeFi Tranquilizer 💊
With the arrival of a positive market moment, such as the one we have been experiencing over the past few weeks, we can see the increase of projects coming to market.
And while investors are on the lookout for the next gem that will shine in the next Bull Run, I couldn’t help but notice that many of these projects have a common denominator, in fact I often notice that their founders overlook a fundamental element that all investors should know, and I’m talking about the presentation of a Whitepaper or at least a Tokenomics.
As we shall see later, for many of them the term Tokenomics is limited to describing Total Supply, mentioning any Burn of the token, or specifying taxes on purchases and sales, stop….
However, this unconscious (or mock unconscious) approach of theirs leaves out such important questions as:
- Were there private sales? And if so, were these Tokens unlocked at launch or do they have release periods?
- How many Tokens does the team hold? And for what purposes?
We at Bubblemaps through our research help many people to shed some light on some of the grey areas of the projects they are following, and that is why I decided to make a small basic guide that will allow you to find out in a few minutes what is really going on behind the scenes of a project, whether the team is doing what they said they were doing, or find out what is going on even in projects with no documentation and where nothing is said.
Let’s start with the mindset of the average investor (or bettor) in the world of DeFi.
The vast majority of people allow themselves to be seduced into buying a seemingly hype product, or one that could be hype, without thinking, and above all without analysing what they are buying, and this often later turns into regret at the total loss of their funds.
Through Bubblemaps, we intend to make the act of buying safer and bring more peace of mind into an investor’s life.
How many of you, after buying a newly launched token, wake up the next morning with the anxiety of having lost everything?
With Bubblemaps, uncertainty can be greatly reduced, allowing one to focus exclusively on the positive outlook.
Case Study - GEOMETRIC ENERGY CORPORATION, $GEC
The Geometric Energy Corporation is a Calgary-based aerospace company, which in May 2021 announced the DOGE-1 project, a space mission entirely financed with the cryptocurrency $DOGE.
The mission involves launching a small (40 kg) satellite into lunar orbit to explore the Moon and display images and digital art on a screen that will be transmitted on the lunar spacecraft and then relayed back to Earth, a miniature screen on the DOGE-1 satellite will display advertisements, images and logos, which will then be transmitted back to Earth.
The satellite will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The $GEC token was launched on 30 November 2023 on the ETH Chain and will soon become a payment option in the SpaceSwap portal, along with USDC, to purchase space ads.
It has been trending steadily for the past few weeks, and I personally discovered it while following some big Whales who were selling the $GROK token for this new $GEC token.
Specifically I was following a whale who dumped about $1M of $Grok to then buy $700K of $GEC, and I got curious (Whale wallet: 0x74d0116552c7a52059b12c0d251976a3405c7806)
First, I gathered general information about the project and the token:
Website: https://www.gectoken.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/geometricenergy
Telegram: https://t.me/GECERC
$GEC: 0x3001f57f8308b189eb412a64322aad5ef9951290
ETH Chain
35M Market Cap at the top
Tot Supply 10'000'000 $GEC
Official Private Sale: 25% of the supply 2,500,000 $GEC
Whitepaper Not Available
Tokenomics Not Available
Chart: https://www.dextools.io/app/en/ether/pair-explorer/0xa2caade2b5d21216836b81dd2d81bd3743ef7988
And after collecting all this information, I noticed that neither a Whitepaper nor a Tokenomics was available, so I went to their social channels and asked about Tokenomics, both to me and to other users, the GEC staff always replied by talking about the taxes and/or the total supply, thus not giving a relevant answer.
However, on their social media I found a useful piece of information: there was a pre-sale of $2,500,000 GEC, or 25 per cent of the total offer.
And this was the starting point for me to begin investigating OnChain.
$GEC BubbleMaps: https://www.dextools.io/app/en/ether/pair-explorer/0xa2caade2b5d21216836b81dd2d81bd3743ef7988
After seeing on BubbleMaps the map of portfolios as at 30 November, I became suspicious.
I noticed how there were many portfolios with 1% of Supply (which I imagined could be investors from the private sale), but I also noticed 2 portfolios with 10% and 8% of Supply, completely unlocked.
So as a first step, I focused chronologically on the private sale, helping myself with Etherscan, and already there is something suspicious.
In fact, while they keep saying on their channels that only one private sale was made in which they sent 2,500,000 GEC, I saw that they actually sent about 5,000,000 GEC from the Deployer wallet as ‘Airdrop’ to a total of 36 wallets:
This means that, in addition to the stated 25%, another 25% of the offer was sent ‘unofficially’.
To express the potential of BubbeMaps, we need only go back in time to the day of the launch and add among the wallets the Deployer wallet, which is the wallet from which the tokens were sent in airdrop.
Once the Deployer is shown on the screen, we can see how it forms a cluster representing 47.5% of the offer:
The Wallet Deployer at that time was at position 153 as a top holder, and through the premium version of Bubblemaps, you can see up to 500Top Holders, which allows us to really dig deep into these searches.
After inquiring in GEC’s Telegram chat, I had a private conversation with some of the project administrators, in which they again emphasised that ‘The only tokens sent are from private sales”:
For the sake of clarity, I found OnChain the wallet with which they collected ETH during the private sale (0xEb8c6044902ad6D71aF64937a35E9A72Dc99fC28), and then checked whether the wallets to which the $GECs were sent had actually paid a counterpart in ETH.
I put everything on an Excel sheet and the result was this:
- 30 portfolios sent ETH for a total of 53 ETH collected and received a total of $2.4M $GEC
- 3 portfolios sent ETH for a total of 5 ETH collected but did not receive $GEC
- 6 wallets did not send ETH and received a total of $2.6M $GEC
Wallet number 35 and number 38 also received some ETH (5 + 2) from the private sale collection wallet, so I can say with near certainty that they came from the team.
This alone would be enough to make us wonder what happened, but something still didn’t add up for me, so I went even deeper into the story and discovered that many of the wallets that received $GEC in Private Sale are actually connected to each other, some via $GEC exchanges others by exchanging $ETH.
Here is an example of some of the portfolios linked together by exchanging $ETH:
I would say that something is not quite right.
But back to why I was initially suspicious, namely that there were initially two portfolios that alone held 18% of the supply:
1- 0xb4c8d7395d3a423478b4ab1f45e63c9237e7bef5 with 10% of the supply
2- 0xe3f37621fb3b459435aaa87a7607fd2ecdf8e893 with 8% of the supply
Both portfolios will try to “deflate” in the hours following the launch, dividing the $GEC tokens into different portfolios.
Through Bubblemaps we can see how the Top Holder with 10% of the supply divides its tokens over time.
In fact, the bubble associated with the wallet over time has become smaller and smaller, and by sending tokens to new wallets we can see the formation of new bubbles all associated with the original one:
The same applies to the Top Holder with 8% of the supply, which is how he divided his tokens over time:
But whoever moved the $GECs didn’t think that with BubbleMaps we can also see the connections these wallets had via other currencies, such as ETH, and that’s why it got caught!
In fact, after these two big wallets start sharing tokens on different wallets, there seem to be ‘only’ two big clusters:
But if we change currency and switch to ETH, we can find a shift of ETH between two portfolios that are in the two respective clusters.
The connected portfolios are:
- 0xb4c8d7395d3a423478b4ab1f45e63c9237e7bef5
- 0x9ef88f4dab8de61e08f0578f111f64638ac7691c
Haven’t you noticed anything?
I’ll give you a hand, one of these two linked wallets, exactly the 0xb4c8d7395d3a423478b4ab1f45e63c9237e7bef5, is at number 34 in the list I posted earlier about Private Sale, and guess what, it’s a completely new wallet that received 10% of the supply from the Deployer wallet without paying anything in ETH.
Therefore, I can say that all of these tokens are interlinked and that the team definitely omitted something and definitely tried to split the tokens into different wallets, in fact as of today on Bubblemaps there are no longer huge bubbles like we saw at the beginning, but we find many small wallets that we know are interlinked.
All this is not to show that the team has bad intentions, in fact we cannot know what the team will do with all these tokens, simply because they have never said so either on their own channels or through documentation.
They may indeed release a Whitepaper and/or Tokenomics in the future, but this research is primarily aimed at investors, helping them to understand how, through even the simple study of Bubblemaps bubbles, they can greatly decrease the likelihood of exposing themselves to unnecessary risk.
Because let’s face it, a project that starts without Whitepaper, without Tokenomics, and of which about 25% of the supply is unlocked and in the hands of the team, is a big Red Flag 🚩
