ZachXBT's original review of "Maji's big cut of Huang Licheng's crypto history"

原文标题：《22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)》
Original author: ZachXBT
Original source: ZachXBT Medium
Original translation: Advac L., Blocktempo
This morning, "Machi Big Brother" Huang Licheng posted on social media that the chain detective ZachXBT had published an article "22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang)" a year ago to damage his reputation, and he has filed a defamation lawsuit against ZachXBT in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.
Let’s go back to a year ago, on June 16, 2022, the chain detective and well-known KOL ZachXBT published a long analysis and revealed that he suspected that Maji Big Brother was related to more than 10 leeks cutting projects, and presented the evidence he collected.
Machida Ge later commented on Twitter and clarified that ZachXBT’s revelation was incorrect information:
"This is false information. If he wasn't anonymous, I would sue him for defamation!"
Below is the full Chinese version of ZachXBT’s investigation report.
brief introduction
Jeffrey Huang, nicknamed Machi Big Brother online, is a former musician and tech entrepreneur who embezzled 22,000 ETH from Formosa Financial in 2018. In the four years since Formosa Financial’s collapse, Jeff has gone on to launch more than a dozen pump and dump token and NFT projects. The following will provide an overview of Machi Big Brother’s career in the cryptocurrency space, a brief summary of Formosa, his subsequent projects, other participants in these projects, and, as always, the evidence to prove it.
Over the past year, “Big Brother Machi” (aka Jeff Huang) has risen to prominence in the NFT space as one of the largest Bored Ape (BAYC) holders. However, few people know about his dark history in the cryptocurrency space…
background
Huang Licheng, also known as "Big Brother Maji", is a former rapper and tech entrepreneur who rose to fame as a founding member of the pop/rap trio LA Boyz in 1991. LA Boyz was active from the early to late 1990s, releasing 13 albums and becoming popular in Asia before disbanding in 1997.
After the success of LA Boyz, Huang founded the hip-hop group Machi in 2003 and achieved further success. MACHI Entertainment is one of the largest hip-hop/rap record labels in Asia and a subsidiary of Warner Music Taiwan, which Huang founded with his partners. Eventually, Huang moved from the music industry to the tech industry with the creation of 17 Media (M17), the parent company of 17 Live. M17 was founded in 2015 and has grown into one of the most popular live streaming apps in Asia.
In 2017, Huang Licheng began his foray into the cryptocurrency space with Mithril, the first of a series of questionable projects that featured murky team members, questionable ethics, and consistent, mechanical pump-and-dump tactics. Let’s dive in.
Project 1: Mithril (MITH)
In late 2017, Maji founded Mithril, a decentralized social media platform that aims to directly reward content creators through its native token, MITH. Mithril conducted a private token sale on February 21, 2018, raising a total of $51.6 million (60,000 ETH), accounting for 30% of the total token supply. In February 2018, 70% of these private tokens were unlocked at the TGE and 30% were unlocked in the following three months. In April 2018, Mithril was listed on the centralized exchange Bithumb. By May 2018, these fully unlocked MITH tokens accounted for 89% of the total circulating supply at the time, and created a huge selling pressure thereafter.
Image source: Binance Research
Mithril Team
Project 2: Formosa Financial
Starting in early 2018, Huang Licheng worked closely with George Hsieh, Czhang Lin, and Ryan Terribilini to found Formosa Finance, a treasury management platform for blockchain companies. Formosa Finance raised an angel round of funding in the last week of April 2018, raising a total of 22,000 ETH. The private round sale ended on May 31st, raising another 22,000 ETH. These tokens sold accounted for 30% of the total supply. Formosa Finance raised a total of $23 million (44,000 ETH). Some well-known investors participated, including Binance, QCP Capital, Lemnis Cap, Block One, Miyin/Huang Licheng (remember this), Maicin, Wilson Huang, Leo Cheng's Syndicate, Blockstate, and Block One.
Equity distribution ratio
Formosa Team
Investors were sold the token with the promise that FMF would be quickly listed on top cryptocurrency exchanges.
Excerpt from a deleted Medium article
Excerpt: Token allocation to potential investors in the white paper
Hints of listing on Binance
Maji's elder brother denied it afterwards
FMF was launched on the decentralized exchange IDEX in June 2018 and immediately plummeted. It was not until September 2018 that it was launched on centralized exchanges (IDEX, UEX).
FMF Token trading status on IDEX trading platform
Meanwhile, 17 Media was originally scheduled to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on June 7, 2018, but the launch of the IPO was delayed after the $115 million fundraising plan fell through due to unspecified settlement issues with investors. ZachXBT reached out to an unnamed source to reveal the reason:
“M17’s suspension of trading and its current private entity status has nothing to do with regulation or Citibank’s failures.
M17 ultimately was unable to meet audit and reporting requirements and was unable to overcome the bid threshold on its books because people could not adapt to the business model.”
After the failed listing, Huang expressed his frustration on Facebook and lashed out at Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, both of which were involved in the IPO.
Three weeks after the FMF ICO, the Formosa Financial project took a sharp turn for the worse, with 11,000 ETH being withdrawn twice from Formosa Financial’s project treasury wallet on June 22, 2018. Unbeknownst to investors, co-founder Xie Guoliang, as the sole director of the company, had pushed for a bilateral stock buyback on his own.
Equity repurchase on 2018/06/22
Equity repurchase on 2018/06/22
 Transaction Record
Xie Guoliang, Huang Licheng and Yalu Lin have all resigned from their official positions, leaving remaining co-founder Ryan Terribilini as CEO and Lorne Lantz as CTO.
Breadcrumbs chart by ZachXBT
This chart shows the ETH that flowed into the multi-signature wallet from the angel/private round funding before Huang Licheng and Xie Guoliang withdrew 11,000 ETH twice on June 22, 2018.
On June 29, 2018, Xie Guoliang transferred 10,500 ETH to the Binance account. The authenticity of the Binance account KYC has not yet been verified.
As for Huang Licheng, the 11,000 ETH he withdrew from his wallet did not move for some time afterwards, until the end of June and the beginning of July when he transferred 4,980 ETH, 1997 ETH, 1,400 ETH, 500 ETH, and 103 ETH to various Binance accounts. Among them, 2,000 ETH was sent to czhang.eth and 20 ETH was allocated to an EOA wallet.
The question remains: to whom do the Binance accounts and wallets belong? Let’s dig a little deeper and take a closer look at some of these ETH exoduses!
1. 4980 ETH outflow from July 26 to July 29, 2018: Records show that this Binance account often flows in from two sources: FTX and littlebang.eth
a) If we look up the owner of littlebang.eth on OpenSea, we see that their username is “Bun919tw”.
Excerpted from Cream Finance Medium article
b) A quick Google search shows that "bun919tw" is actually Bun Hsu, a core engineer of Cream Finance (Cream is another project of Huang Licheng.)
c) Bun Hsu’s Twitter avatar is BoredApe BAYC #7066, which was gifted to him by machibigbrother.eth (Jeff’s public wallet).
Bored Ape BAYC #7066
d) Bun Hsu in turn happens to trade multiple Jeff projects such as FMF, SWAG, CREAM, SQUID, PHOON, MCX and MIS/MIC.
Why did a person who was not in the Formosa Finance team receive 4,980 ETH just 3 weeks after IC0, trade tokens from other Machi Big Brother projects, and receive BAYC from Machi Big Brother?
2. 2,000 ETH outflow on July 11, 2018: The blockchain records show that the transaction has been received by czhang.eth (Czhang Lin). Mr. Lin worked as a consultant at Formosa Finance until June 22.
a) Three weeks after Czhang received 2,000 ETH, Czhang sent 150 ETH to his brother Lin Yalu (COO of Formosa Finance) on July 22, 2018.
Once again, why would a consultant and COO of Formosa Finance take money to build a project?
3. 1,997 ETH outflow on July 28, 2018: The only funds that flowed into this Binance account came from harrisonhuang.eth, an account that frequently interacts with w9g.eth (Wilson Huang), VP of Engineering at Mithril and current founder of XY Finance and GalaXY Kats.
Wilson sends NFT to Harrison
a) From a quick Twitter search for harrisonhuang.eth, we can assume this is his Twitter account, as he tweeted his ENS address in a reply to Wilson.
Twitter's connection
Harrison is not listed as a team member in the Formosa Financial white paper or website. Once again, there is a pattern of individuals with no public connection to Formosa receiving project funding.
The remaining Binance accounts that received funds from Huang Licheng have reached a dead end; these accounts have not had any recent interactions with other external or personal addresses, and transactions were simply moved from CEX to CEX.
On July 26, 2018, Huang Licheng and Mithril were caught trying to cheat in the Binance monthly community coin voting. A user named Lucky found evidence that Mithril had received more than 80,000 votes, which were funded by only two or three addresses.
The social currency voting function is like this: 1 BNB equals 1 vote, and each account is allowed to have a maximum of 500 BNB/vote, so a voter can have a maximum of 500 votes by holding 500 BNB. However, in the rules, Binance stated that if a fake account is created and a large amount of BNB is dispersed, it will be automatically disqualified from the competition.
In the Mithril movement at the time, Huang Licheng used the same address that was closely associated with Formosa Finance ICO, which held $8.6 million worth of MITH. The following figure shows the wallet that transferred BNB in ​​batches, receiving ETH as gas from the wallet of the largest Mithril whale at the time.
Breadcrumbs address flow chart for Mithril, by ZachXBT
To make matters worse, the large amount of BNB used to defraud the SocialCoin vote occurred on the same day that Bun Hsu received 1,980 ETH. In fact, it was deposited into his Binance account less than an hour before the vote.
While examining on-chain transactions, I found additional instances of BNB being distributed to Binance in smaller amounts (500 BNB or less), consistent with the timeline of the theft of FMF funds.
1a) 2000 ETH was deposited into Bun Hsu’s Binance account at 3:25 AM (UTC) on July 28.
1b) Withdraw 43.8k BNB (presumably Bun) from Binance at 4:43 AM (UTC) on July 28
2a) July 28th at 7:08 AM, deposit 1994 ETH to Harrison Huang Binance
2b) July 28th at 7:28 AM (UTC), withdraw 30,000 BNB from Binance
Once again, these addresses are associated with Huang Licheng/Miyin. Unfortunately, this is where the majority of Formosa Finance’s funds are most likely going.
Mithril won the vote.
Filter out the so-called abnormal votes on Binance.
Once again, that’s what Formosa Finance money is for.
This is where they flow:
In the fall of 2018, when communication with Huang Licheng, Czhang, and other key members of the FMF team became increasingly distant, and no proper explanation or project updates were given, token holders began to suspect something was wrong. FMF continued to plummet, and the sudden abandonment of key team members put the project in trouble.
Wash Trading Robot on IDCM
Project 3: Machi X
In October 2018, Huang and Leo Cheng launched Machi X, an intellectual property rights trading platform, but they had difficulty obtaining funding due to the performance of Huang’s previous projects, Mithril and Formosa Finance.
Mithril was listed on Binance in November 2018, coinciding with the unlocking of the team’s token share. At that time, MITH had fallen by more than 80%, and until 2020, team development had been completely abandoned.
BlockBeats Note: MITH was delisted by Binance in December 2022. CZ said that the price of MITH is far lower than when it was first released, and the project's website is offline. The project's official Twitter account has not posted a tweet or updated the community for nearly 2 years. I believe the Binance team made the right decision in this matter.
Price performance. Source: Coingecko
It wasn’t until more than a year after launch that Formosa Financial’s investors finally learned what had happened to their investment. On August 12, 2019, Formosa Financial investors received an anonymous email stating that 22,000/44,000 ETH had been stolen from Formosa Financial’s IC0 private placement wallet just three weeks after the 2018 IC0. Various internal documents proving this were attached to the email.
In this leaked recording from 2019, former Formosa Finance CEO Ryan Terribilini reveals his version of the story about Jeff and George embezzling funds.
I reached out to multiple VCs and angels who invested in the project to get a better understanding of why they didn’t take legal action against Huang and Xie. This largely came down to the fact that Huang and Xie were seen as powerful figures in Taiwan, and the investors I spoke to were worried about what would happen if they came forward. Others simply didn’t want to deal with the mess, as what was happening occurred in multiple jurisdictions. All agreed that they just wanted to forget that this even happened in the first place.
Project 4: Cream Finance
In 2020, the cryptocurrency market began to heat up again. Huang Licheng forked the decentralized lending platform Compound Finance in early July 2020 and created Cream Finance with Leo Cheng. Bun Hsu, Jeremy Yang, and Stanley Yang are all on the Cream development team. As of today, due to technical negligence, Cream Finance has been stolen three times for more than $192 million.
Project 5: Wifey Finance
In August, an "anonymous team" created Wifey Finance, a fork of Yearn Finance. Maji Da Ge, Leo Cheng, and Wilson Huang all happened to be the first members of the Wifey Discord channel. TTransaction records show that Wifey's deployers sent money to Wilson Huang many times. Four days later, Wifey Finance was abandoned.
Smart contract created on 2020/8/8
The Majidage address is one of the earliest transaction addresses
Machi was one of the first people to join the Discord
Wilson Huang received funds from Wifey Deployer
Then Leo Cheng (Lumberg) came along.
There have been no posts or activity in Discord since August 7, 2020. Wifey has a lifespan of 5 days.
Project 6: Swag Finance
Another project founded by Majida, Swag.live is an adult entertainment website that launched a governance token in early October 2020. The lack of transparency around the listing caused quite a bit of controversy on Twitter when Swag was quietly listed as collateral on Cream Finance. Within weeks, the token was mined, dumped, and delisted from Cream.
Swag Controversy
Dig, sell and smash
Swag was removed from Cream, 1.5 months after the token was released
Project 7: Mith Cash
On December 30, 2020, Huang and Mithril returned with a new project: Mith Cash, a fork of the Basis Cash protocol. Just a few days after its launch, Mith Cash's total value (TVL) grew to $1 billion, and then the price suddenly collapsed as token holders cashed out their rewards. Mith Cash eventually suffered the same fate as Basis Cash. Similar to Huang's other projects, the team is "anonymous" and Huang claims that he is just an advisor.
MITH Cash Token price chart. Source: CoinMarketCap
Project 8: Typhoon Cash
Shortly after the Mith Cash crash and burn, Big Brother Moji is back again with the Tornado Cash fork project Typhoon Cash. The Typhoon team claims to have an anonymous team, but it is known that Huang Licheng and his friends are behind Typhoon. At the time of release, it was obvious that the development was sloppy. Anyone can stake in the anonymous pool and remain anonymous, but in order to receive rewards, it is necessary to stake in the pool. This means that in order to receive rewards, your reward deposit will be doxxed, making the concept of an anonymous coin worthless. Within a few weeks after mining began, the project was abandoned again, and members who left the Telegram and Discord channels ruined it.
Rewkang was one of the first five members of the Telegram group.
Typhoon Cash vulnerability revealed by Avner and verified by Nick.
example:
The withdrawal address under the recipient,
Unstake and withdraw from the second address.
No updates have been posted on Discord, Telegram, or Twitter since February 2021, and people are screwed again.
Project 9: Mud Games
As Loot for Adventurers (random in-game assets stored on-chain) suddenly became popular in late August 2021, CoinDesk quickly forked his own version called Heroes of Evermore, which quickly netted the anonymous team a profit of 533.92 ETH. Unlike Loot, Evermore’s heroes were not random, and anonymous team members quietly minted all of the rarest NFTs in the series without Evermore holders knowing.
Team members Jeff and Penguin both minted rare NFT collections#2and #3
Project 10: Squid DAO
Once again, an “anonymous team” supported the launch of the Squid DAO, a fork of the OHM/Nouns DAO that emerged in October 2021. Among the early holders was MachiBigBrother.eth. By January 2022, the project was shut down at the suggestion of Machi.
Machi's tough pass governance proposal vote
Today, Big Brother Machi has moved on to X, XY Finance, and most recently, his latest fork: Ape Finance.
XY Finance Team and Advisors
X Consultants
 Ape Finance
Across many of Huang’s projects, we see the same recurring themes: anonymous teams, forked projects, new wallets funded through FTX, and short lifecycles. We see the same players in every project, Wilson and/or Leo always hanging out with the big brothers. VCs like Andrew Kang don’t even see it. I reached out to Andrew in October 2021, and this is what he said:
Andrew Kang, founder of YFI
Then in February, Andrew again expressed his support for Huang, even though by this time, Cream was all but dead. It’s sad that people turn a blind eye to the obvious rug-stamping when money is involved, especially when the parties involved are financially harming others at great cost, whether through 10+ low-effort projects or by helping to embezzle 22,000 ETH.
Image from PleasrDAO Telegram group
As a courtesy, I contacted Huang before this article was published. He stressed that he was only compensated for his role as an advisor to Formosa Finance, claimed he had no knowledge of the 4,980 ETH payment to Bun or Harrison, and insisted he never cheated in the SocialCoin competition. I believe there are too many coincidences between all of these projects for this to be the case.
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