Overview

Damien — a former wealth manager who had been quietly removed from his last firm for an issue HR described to us as "an issue" — wanted to bring the financialisation of personal failure on-chain. His thesis: every parking ticket, unpaid invoice and family loan is a tradable asset. The market simply has not realised it yet. We agreed not to dispute this.

Our scope was to define the tokenomics, ghostwrite the whitepaper, build the marketing site, and stand up the smart contracts on a low-fee chain we had not heard of before the kickoff call. We did all four, mostly on the flight back from a "founder retreat" in Tulum that the client paid for in full.

The whitepaper is 38 pages. Roughly 22 of them are direct copies from a 2017 Medium post about supply-chain provenance, with "container shipments" replaced by "personal liabilities" and a few transitional sentences inserted by an intern. The grammar is the giveaway.

The Tulum offsite

The retreat ran six nights. Two were billed as "deep workshops." The other four are not accounted for in any document we are willing to surface. The client expense for the trip totalled £147,000 and includes a line item for "ceremonial cacao facilitation." We are still not sure what that is.

We took our fee in $RECLAIM tokens at a vesting cliff that did not exist. The cliff was added to the tokenomics document the morning after the cliff would have ended, and the document was backdated to launch. The token went from $0.84 at TGE to $0.0006 inside ten weeks. We had unwound our position by week three.

The treasury wallet — which we set up, owned the keys to, and described to Damien as "fully decentralised" — has a routing condition that sweeps 12% of inflow to a Cayman entity called Lucent Holdings BVI. Lucent is also the legal name of one of our partners' fishing boats.

What we did