So, the day has come. It has been more than a month with no refunds at all (take aside the refund that was done today – it was a holder who has been trying to do it for a long time with little success, and thanks to the great telegram community he finally succeeded).
I will initiate the Round B on Tuesday, April 19th, 2022. On that date refunds will no longer be available to WIZ holders. So if you still hold some WIZ for some weird reason (it is of course your right to do so) but the coming few days is your last chance to convert your WIZ to ETH using the refund smart contract.
Once the Round B is initiated, you will need to register with the refund smart contract by calling register method of the contract from the same address you refunded the ETH in Round A. Trying to register from any other address will fail.
At the time of writing more than 1,000 ETH is still in the smart contract unclaimed. It is worth well over $3m USD.`
So two thirds of the funds were unclaimed.
At the moment I am too busy with my family issues so I will not be able to make adjustments to the refund app to make it easy for you to do the registration. However it should be pretty straight forward to do it via etherscan.io. The full instructions are here.
So… Ok it’s hard enough to move the funds to Metamask wallet for some holders and even though many great people in the refund telegram group are helping the new members with the refund its still quite a ride for vast majority of the holders.
So I was curious to learn this pretty cool javascript framework for front end web developers: vuetifyjs on my spare time, and I spent couple of weekends playing with it.
Decided to make something simple and achievable to be done in a few days, so naturally the refund app came to mind.
Is there really an advantage of making an investment decision based on the opinion of the many? Is it better to make trades based on your own research or just invest into S&P 500 index and wait for your capital to grow? Or may be its better to keep your money in the bank and avoid the investments all together?
Where would you find answers to all these fundamental questions? That’s right, you know where to find them – you are an early investor into CrowdWiz and people who founded this amazing project have weighted all the pros and cons and they know the answers for sure!
And there is a place to look for the info: the White Paper! Well, let’s have a look.
In the paper you will find a description of the problem that investors face today that CrowdWiz will happily solve:
Also the challenges they face solving the problem:
The Paper will briefly mention the solutions:
You will also find the list of respectable academics in trading and investing that have founded this amazing project:
.. and some other defendants in Tradologic criminal case with hundreds of victims of fraud. By the way they strangely forget to mention here that their most recent place of work is Tradologic Solutions / GFS
There is a lot of other boring info on the products the project is about to launch: WizApp, WizExchange, WizFund, and a dozen other Wiz* things that make very little sense and poorly described. You will find a very brief description of architecture, milestones, technology, market size and competitors.
What you will not find in the Paper is the answers to our fundamental questions. Why the investment decisions of the many is better than a decision of one expert? How will CrowdWiz function in every detail, how the votes will influence investments? Will the votes be weighed against the amounts of investments of the voters? Are the voters required to make any investments at all? What theory justifies the assumption that the mechanics of the project will actually work?
You will find pretty much nothing that you would expect from an ICO WhitePaper. And there is a reason for this.
Ilan Tzroya and Micha Golod never intended to have a working product, the only purpose for CrowdWiz was to get the money from investors, spend 50k for some silly product that will never work, pump his rep with another marketing success and be done with it.
The white paper here is just a ticked checkbox in todo list separating Ilan and Micha from millions of dollars in crypto currency.
But let’s try to think about the subject of the matter. Does crowd investing actually work?
This is very easy to answer apparently.
First we need to determine wether or not the stock market, forex or any other investment strategy is a game of skill or a game of chance. If it is a game of chance then a single monkey making the investment decisions for you is no worse than 1000 investment experts. The outcome of your investments will depend on chance rather than the skill of the decision makers.
This may sound weird, but that’s how it is in the game of roulette, lottery, dice and many other games, where your choice of decisions gives you nothing but illusion that you influence your bottomline. It doesn’t matter if you bet on black or red your odds of winning in roulette is always the same. So you may as well take that monkey with you next time you go to casino.
Now another extreme is a pure game of skill. Chess, Box, Hockey.
In the game of skill experts have an advantage and you will loose playing against stronger opponents. Ok this is easy.
Now since skill is never distributed evenly among people there are people that are highly skilled and win in 99% of cases. Others will loose most of the time.
Let’s think of an example where trading is a pure game of skill where each trade is one game, and there is an infinite number of games you can play until you are out of balance.
In such scenario given uneven distribution of skill among players we can expect that after large enough number of games there will only be 1 winner. I already bored you enough with White Paper and I understand its hard to read my English, so I will pass on further boring you with proof of why this assumption is true. You will need to take my word for it. So in the end we will be left with only one winning trader. (Warren Buffet ?)
Doesn’t matter what investment strategy you take, what instruments you use, be it stock market, forex or commodity markets, you are playing a game that sits somewhere on a scale between two extremes – pure game of skill and pure game of chance.
Now on one end of the scale, we know that it doesn’t matter who makes your decisions, your odds of winning are independent of decision maker. On the other end, you have pretty much zero chances of winning unless your decisions are made by the best expert.
Now as you slide along the scale from game of skill to game of chance, you will see that the number of winners will increase from 1 to 2, 3 and so on… And the number of loosers will decrease from N-1, to N-2, N-3 and so on. And at the end of the scale where our game becomes pure game of chance, there will be N/2 winners and N/2 loosers. (where N is the total number of players in our simulated game..).
In the pure game of chance after large enough number of games exactly half of the players will be winners and the other half will be loosers. Ok this makes sense, so no proof needed.
Game of skill vs game of chance
So if investing is not a pure game of chance we can say for sure, that less than half of the investors will be successful investors due to the fact that skill does play some role in investing and that the investment skill is not distributed evenly among investors.
So why is this important?
It’s important because if we assume that stock market or any other investment is not a pure game of chance we have just proved that most traders will loose in the long run. And “crowd” is not a good source of investment decisions.
I am sure you don’t want the crowd to vote for your chess moves playing Gary Kasparov. So why would one want the crowd make investment decisions?
It’s just a provably stupid idea.
Now I can hear you telling me that I got it all wrong, and didn’t consider a case where its not just some random crowd that makes the decisions.
Let’s say we have devised an ingenious system of selecting the best skilled traders and now we employ only those who (let’s say) have a positive history of performance.
Now if we possess such expertise, first of all we are no longer into crowd wisdom. We are now experts in determining of investor skills and this activity should have a different name – ExpertWiz? WizRank?
Second – crowd (even if its a crowd of experts) presumes that there are quite a few individual experts and these experts will also have an unevenly distributed skill levels. If we can determine the skill of each investor, we should use the best skilled investor rather than many of them. So the fewer experts from the top chart we take, the higher is the average skill of the decision makers. Again larger number of decision makers does not produce better results, quite the contrary.
And last but not least. In practice – there is no way to determine the skill levels of investors. Past performance, education and other indicators simply do not guarantee that the expert is on the right side of the winners threshold.
There is no consensus in the scientific community even in the answer to the question of wether the stock market is a game of skill or a game of chance.
Whatever it is, at best the crowd will give you zero advantage in trading. But there is some good news.
As far as the stock market is concerned, even if it is a pure game of chance you don’t have to be an expert to see that the game has positive odds of winning:
CrowdWiz.io is the brainchild of Ilan Tzroya (aka Tzorya) the founder of Tradologic, DTI Holdings, Krypton Capital and their derivatives I happened to invest into.
The child was born out of ICO hype that was at its peak at the end of 2017. Everyone was crazy about distributed ledgers, blockchain and crowd everything… ICOs were attracting tens and sometimes hundreds of millions raised in cryptocurrency.
Ilan, being the CEO of Krypton Capital at the time, put in charge of CrowdWiz Delzar Khalaf who left Tradologic some time ago, and was not planning to return. Neither Delzar nor the people around him could understand the idea behind CrowdWiz that Ilan Tzroya was trying to explain in his vague manner. I guess it didn’t take long for Delzar to understand that the only idea behind CrowdWiz was to collect as much money from crypto investors as possible and only then think of the idea. This could be the reason why Delzar rapidly left the project.
I met Delzar when I was first introduced to Tradologic back in 2013 or so, and he seemed like a good and honest person.
For some reason Ilan decided to make CrowdWiz.io the subsidiary of Tradologic, and not Krypton Capital – a holding that was meant for all crypto-related ventures. By the time CrowdWiz needed a separate registered company, Delzar has already left, and Ilan put in charge Micha Golod, who went from being CEO of Tradologic to being the face and “founder” of CrowdWiz.io.
The company was registered in Estonia, and Micha became the beneficial owner, the director of the company. He was introduced as founder of CrowdWiz on all the shows and meetings with investors.
ICO marketing takes a lot of resources, and funds. All the marketing for CrowdWiz.io was financed by Tradologic Solutions, half of the people involved in the project was also employees for Tradologic. The 2017 annual report of Tradologic to its shareholders, where my company (Oldypak) happened to be the biggest shareholder at the time showed that around $700,000 was spent by Tradologic for marketing of CrowdWiz.io.
After the end of the ICO, Micha Golod claimed that they raised more than $7m in funds. Wether or not this is true I can’t know for sure as I never had access to bank accounts, BUT I can tell with a high probability that this stated amount is exaggerated.
The crypto part of the funds raised was controlled by ICOadm.in – the subsidiary of Krypton Capital setup by Ilan Tzroya, but this part of the business was managed by me. Of many dozens of Ilan’s projects ICOadm.in was actually the only project managed by myself. CrowdWiz.io team simply had no expertise in blockchain nor in holding crypto funds. That’s why Micha only controlled the fiat investments, while ICOadm.in was responsible for keeping the multi-sigs with crypto currencies raised.
As far as crypto, the ICO raised the following amounts:
ETH 1,922.9
BTC 2.1458
LTC 200
At its peak all the crypto funds held in CrowdWiz multi-sigs were worth around 2.5m USD.
On request of Micha Golod some of the crypto funds were spent on exchange listings, for example HitBTC listing. The good news is, the majority of the funds remain untouched in the multi-sig wallet.
All the Bitcoin and Litecoin holdings were spent entirely. While the Ethereum remains in the amount of ETH 1544 which is approximately 3/4 of the crypto funds raised.
The rest of the $7m raised (approx $4.5m) was supposedly raised by fiat. There was definitely some money raised by wires and credit cards, but I am sure its nowhere close to that amount. Some of the fiat investments I assume was spent by Micha and Ilan on development of actual product as promised by the project to investors. But it is a tiny fraction of the raised fiat.
As post ICO development stage went on, the value of the tokens fell significantly. Partly due to the overall ICO market slide, but also the release of Beta CrowdWiz was postponed every few months. The roadmap’s milestones were more than a year behind.
In the meantime Tradologic was completely taken over by Ilan Tzroya with the help of Micha Golod. A criminal case against both characters was initiated in Austria, and Tradologic is now being investigated for facilitating fraud by enabling their merchants to fix odds of trades done on the platform.
In the midst of being investigated by Austrian and Bulgarian authorities, Ilan Tzroya has taken over the assets of Tradologic, Krypton Capital, and their subsidiaries and run away with companys’ funds. All shareholders including myself who invested into his businesses were simply scammed. The businesses turned out to be scamming customers, and that’s the reason they managed to show profits for a short while making the businesses attractive to investors when Ilan needed to raise more funds for yet another round of investments.
As these events were spinning before my eyes, ICOadm.in could no longer act on the orders of Micha Golod and Ilan Tzroya gang. Some shareholders of Tradologic were also investigated in criminal proceedings and it was not clear what to do with the crypto funds held on behalf of CrowdWiz (i.e. Tradologic).
By the time I was able to obtain a positive decision from the majority of shareholders of Tradologic to release the funds to token holders, Micha started a civil proceedings against me trying to get his hands on the crypto raised during the ICO. This delayed the funds release for more than a year more.
The period from June 2019 to September 2020 was a busy time for Micha Golod – the CEO of CrowdWiz.io. His lawyers were fighting fearlessly in Russian courts in order to get their hands on the cryptocurrency of victims of CrowdWiz.io ICO scam.
Not only were they claiming the remaining cryptocurrency, but they misrepresented the amount of funds held in multi-sig wallets (as if nothing was spent from the funds), came up with a ridiculous amount of damages ($1,242,064.36), and forgot to mention that CrowdWiz.io was the property of Tradologic Solutions, where my company happened to be a majority shareholder, defrauded of assets by the same people who were now trying to sue me.
None of the above facts really affected the ruling of the courts however. Matter of fact is the Russian courts are immune to justice towards foreign crypto investors. But unwittingly this time however, the rusted gears of Russian justice have spat out a series of good decisions.
The fact that the crypto funds are not in the hands of criminals and that I don’t have to pay some ridiculous damages is for sure fair and beneficial to current holders of tokens. As a bonus to the holders the fact that this process took many months allowed for significant regain in the value of the ETH stuck in multi-sig wallet.
Below is the boring timeline of the court decisions.
June 25, 2019 – Moscow Arbitration Court
CrowdWiz OU submits a statement of claim against KRYPTON LLC and V. A. Smirnov:
to ensure the return of ETH 1922.903438, BTC 2.1457893617, LTC 199.5696692 to the digital wallets of contributors in proportion to the size of the contribution of each contributor;
to return the amount of unjustified enrichment and interest in the amount of 1,242,064.36 US dollars.
On November 1, 2019, the Moscow Arbitration Court rules: To refuse to satisfy the stated requirements in full.
Here is the google translate of the ruling:
Refusing to satisfy the claim, the court indicated that the plaintiff did not provide evidence that the cryptocurrency of specific types in a certain amount belonged to the plaintiff, and that the cryptocurrency in the indicated amount was actually transferred to the defendants' disposal, and the plaintiff did not provide any relevant, admissible evidence. Confirming the arguments of the plaintiff about the amount of lost income through the fault of the defendant, and the correspondence presented by the plaintiff has no evidentiary value for the claim, the court came to the conclusion that there was no basis for satisfying the claim.
March 27, 2020 The Arbitration Court of the Moscow District
CrowdWiz OU submits a cassation appeal against the decision of the Arbitration Court of the City of Moscow, and against the decision of the Court of Appeal.
May 27, 2020 – The court leaves the ruling of the court of first instance and the ruling of the Court of Appeal unchanged, the cassation appeal is not satisfied
July 22, 2020 – The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation
CrowdWiz OU submits a cassation appeal (presentation) to the Supreme Court.
September 17, 2020 – The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation issues a ruling on the refusal to transfer the cassation appeal for consideration in the court session of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
It’s a game over for Micha and the gang. But it’s good news for the holders of WIZ. Now nothing stopping me from distributing the ETH among the holders. It will take a couple of months to prepare the smart contract, and make announcements, but now it will be done soon enough.
