A recent piece of news came out about
Bitclave, the first crypto project our team worked on seven years ago. Its history was marked by both success and failure. It included years of legal battles between co-founders and disputes with the SEC. The ICO involved U.S. investors, and the SEC determined that it violated securities laws. As a result, everything the company had was handed over to the SEC for redistribution to investors. This week, after many years, the SEC reported that it distributed the funds. Where the rest of the money went remains a mystery. Perhaps there were few claims for refunds, and the remaining funds are still with the SEC.
Our team was no longer part of the project by the time the money was handed over to the SEC, as my co-founder decided to seize all the funds at the height of success. He transferred all the crypto to his personal wallet and filed a lawsuit against me with false documents to pressure me into giving up the fight. I didnât back down. I believed the courts would judge fairly, as the truth was on my side. However, while the truth was on my side, the fake documents and the cost of legal representation were not. He spent $5 million of ICO investor money on lawyers for the court battles with me. I didnât have that kind of money to defend myself properly, and I lost the case, ending up in debt as well.
Out of a team of 30 people, only three followed my co-founder, despite him having all the funds. He couldnât use money to overcome the unethical nature of his actions. The rest stayed with us. The PR claim in the news that we raised $25M in 32 seconds was just marketing. In reality, it took six months and several million dollars in advertising and development. Investors contributed over six months, and the ICO itself took place with prior contributions factored in. Since then, our team has become smaller, but everyone who did the bulk of the work back then, including marketing, is still with us. It was a valuable life lesson.
Justice was at least partially served. After my co-founder celebrated his court victory and sole control of the company, within weeks, he had to hand over all remaining funds to the SEC for redistribution to investors. How many millions he siphoned off remains unknown, but judging by the companyâs public report, he didnât hand over everything.
Since then, weâve stayed in the crypto space, creating various tools on the Ethereum network (without tokens), but they didnât generate revenue. There was no money to pay the team, and it shrank. Two developers later created the highly successful project 1inch, and one of them even invested in our current project. Now itâs our turn to build a successful project.
For Uniton holders, this story might be of interest because the main idea behind Bitclaveâthe one we aimed to realize at the timeâwas a decentralized search engine where ad revenue goes to users rather than the company. It was an ambitious attempt to rival Googleâs business model. Many years later, I still believe that the distribution of ad revenue is deeply unfair. At the dawn of the internet, Google provided value commensurate with what it earned from âsellingâ users to advertisers. That balance has long been broken.
The cost of technology has plummeted, while ad revenues have skyrocketed, allowing Google and similar companies to reap massive profits by selling us. Since individual users donât care much about this and remain unaware of their own value, this has continued for years. However, more balanced models are now emerging. For example, Twitter and Telegram share revenue with the owners of large accounts and channels. But again, not with users. Itâs easiest to infringe on user rights because they are highly fragmented and lack the collective power to fight back.
Despite all this, I continue to believe that the balance will soon begin to shift, and networks will emerge where users receive their fair share of the revenue advertisers generate from their audience. Uniton was created with this very idea in mind.