In a recent “Short and Distort” operation, an unidentified and dishonest organization going by the name of “Zeus Capital” wrote and aggressively promoted a hit article on Chainlink. The LINK currency, the Chainlink network, and the SmartContract team have all been the subject of extensive disinformation campaigns, false charges, and easily refutable claims. The scam is motivated by greed. They are attempting to make a quick and dirty profit by hiding behind anonymity and spreading false information to emotionally blackmail holders of LINK tokens into selling their holdings and betting against one of the most widely used technologies in the entire blockchain industry, rather than putting reputational risk behind their ludicrous claims.
The short and distorted chainlink defense
A 66-page study titled “The Chainlink Fraud Exposed” was released on July 17, 2020, by an unnamed source referred to as “Zeus Capital LLP.” Along with it, they launched a massive spam email campaign, promoted tweets, and private messages offering to pay bigger cryptocurrency influencers and traders to do bearish technical analysis on the LINK chart.
Apart from the anonymous source and funded misinformation effort, which frequently capitalizes terms like “STRONG SELL” and makes exaggerated assertions without providing any proof, it is instantly clear that they wrote the report with ulterior motives. The majority of the report's claims may be disproved with a quick Google search. For instance:
They say Chainlink is on Testnet, however it has been on mainnet since May 30, 2019, and it serves as oracles for a vast number of real apps that safeguard more than $1.5B in value in total. They attempted to justify this by claiming that Chainlink wasn't a functioning blockchain, although that was never its intended use. It is middleware that operates on any blockchain both on-chain and off-chain (to connect to any external system).
Although Chainlink has more than 200 partners, integrations, and partnerships, they assert that adoption is dropping when, in fact, it has been increasing tremendously since inception. Many industry-leading initiatives claim that by connecting with Chainlink, they were able to quickly go to market, gain crucial off-chain data resources, and improve their security through enhanced decentralization.
When in fact several project owners who have merged with Chainlink, such Kava and Aave, have openly acknowledged that they pay to use the Chainlink network, they falsely claim that projects are freeloading and even get paid to use it.
They assert that the team is small and inexperienced, despite the fact that the founder (involved since 2014) is a pioneer in the blockchain oracle space, the team is rapidly expanding (now 40+ members), and they have outspoken and highly qualified advisors like Ari Juels, a former chief scientist at RSA, Tom Gonser, the founder of DocuSign, Evan Chang, and numerous others.
They assert that the SWIFT and Google collaborations are fraudulent since the logos were “removed from the website,” while Google is clearly shown on the chain.link website. To discover a quote from Google's Allen Day, you just need to make an effort to navigate through their panel of quotations. On the other side, connections to the Sibos PoC work that SWIFT carried out are highlighted on the smartcontract.com website.
These are only a handful of the many readily refutable assertions that anybody may independently confirm with little effort.
A False Anonymous Entity: Zeus Capital LLP
Examining the organization that issued the report is crucial before analyzing the data it contains. They advertise themselves as “an asset management organization focusing on alternative investments, market infrastructure inefficiencies, and event-driven possibilities” on the website that is cited in the report. But as soon as you put in even a little effort, it's obvious they're not like that at all.
Fraudulent Use of Business Brands and Logos
On the website of Zeus Capital, there is a list of “Zeus Friends” that includes numerous publications, businesses, and initiatives. However, their “friends” have publicly and/or privately declared that they have no relation to Zeus and have sought to be deleted; the intention was to provide social proof of Zeus's authenticity.
The inventor of one of the top three DeFi protocols, Aave, whose decentralized lending network presently has almost a billion dollars in value locked in, Marc Zeller, claims below that Aave did not grant any approval to be included on their website and has asked to be removed right away. The irony is that Aave is actually one of Chainlink's biggest live customers and has repeatedly emphasized how crucial it is to their project's success.
Aave has not yet been taken off from the Zeus Capital website as of the time this story was written. He is not the only one who has asked to leave yet is still there. Numerous companies mentioned on Zeus's website were contacted by a member of the community, and every single one of them claimed to be unrelated to Zeus Capital and that their logos had been used without permission. These fictitious associations have not all been taken off. The fact that they haven't even released a statement explaining the situation suggests that Zeus intentionally misled about their partners in order to achieve their own objectives.
