I, the Fruitful Knight, seemed to have stumbled upon a proper scam all on my lonesome! I was looking into BASE as I was thinking about investing but it seems to be a scam that no one else has written about.
First of all, what is Base Protocol?
If you are familiar with Ampleforth and it's rebase function Base Protocol will make sense to you. Unlike AMP, BASE is pegged to the total value of the cryptomarket. 1 BASE is supposed to be valued at one trillionth of the entire cryptocurrency market. So if the market trades BASE higher or lower than that BASE will increase or decrease in quantity to compensate and by doing so insist that the market prices it as it wishes.
All cryptocurrencies have niches that can be quite small and they often face heavy competition, so finding a project that makes you feel safe is difficult. There are many uncertainties in the cryptomarket. Who know? BTC and ETH might one day be replaced as the top coins.
So having exposure to the bullish market of cryptocurrencies yet still investing safely can be a tricky prospect, and all this is the appeal of BASE. Unfortunately it seems to be a scam and I will now explain why.
If you go to their site( https://www.baseprotocol.org/) you will find links to their Twitter and Discord. The Discord link is invalid and the Twitter account is suspended:
You will also find information about the developers there:
And if you go into their LinkedIn you will find that the first developer only has Base Protocol as his experience. According to their LinkedIn profiles the second one and third one has or are working for Techparty and for Brittlemama but both the links on their profiles do not work:
On their Medium profile they defend themselves against allegations of stealing funds. I haven't been able to find out the nature of the accusation but it is obviously serious enough to prompt the developers to respond.
However the price of BASE seem to be hovering where it should, I've checked their dashboard over some days along with a cross-reference in the form of Coingecko. As far as I can tell BASE is behaving as it should.
There is only on audit on their Github, I've never gone through one of these before but Halborn Security rates this Smart Contract as a low risk one. There is room for some miner manipulation by abusing the protocol in some way but the auditor sounds very optimistic about the safety of the project.
In conclusion:
There are many factors that points to something fishy about Base Protocol, I would suggest that anyone looking to invest does some research of their own beforehand. If I come across more specifics about the situation I'll make another article about it so subscribe if you are curious. And should you want to learn more about BASE I suggest listening to this interview on Satoshi Streets Bets with a developer:
The Fruitful Knight, signing out!
