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Tales from Crypto’s Past 008 | After $4.1 billion came in, he turned the money into a pile of Bitcoin, put it in another company, and took it public

On April 29, 2018, EOS hit $22.89, with a market cap of $18.8 billion, putting it among the world’s top five cryptocurrencies. Back then, Chinese crypto circles called it “柚子” (yòuzi, or “pomelo”). If you didn’t have a few pomelos in your wallet, you were almost embarrassed to speak in the group chat.

The money had actually all been raised long before. In George Town, Cayman Islands, Block.one spent a year selling tokens day by day, raising $4.1 billion—the largest offering of its kind in history. The CEO was Brendan Blumer; the CTO was Dan Larimer, known in crypto circles as BM.

Eight years later, the pomelo has a new name. In March 2025, the EOS network announced it was changing its name to Vaulta, and its token ticker from EOS to A. A is now trading at $0.0954. Anyone who bought at $22.89 would need it to rise 240-fold just to break even.

The technology didn’t fail. Transfers really are fee-free, blocks are produced in rounds of 63 seconds, and the chain has kept running all this time. It was other parts that failed.

The money was all raised in the first year, but delivery was stretched out over ten years, with a Cayman-registered private company in between—a company that, legally, never owed a single cent to any token holder. The company that raised the money wasn’t EOS’s owner. Neither were the 21 block-producing nodes, nor the foundation that later took over the code.

The $4.1 billion was gone. Who had to pay it back? No one. Not a cent.

I went back through the reports from the time and the announcements that followed. The thing worth watching was, of all things, a number in the election rules.

EOS governance was called DPoS: token holders voted to elect 21 nodes to produce blocks. The rules were detailed: each EOS could cast 30 votes, but only one vote could go to any given node. The designers were worried that big holders would throw all their votes behind a single operator. Written that way, mathematically, every vote had to be spread around—to 30 different operators. And if a node wanted votes, there was really only one thing it could offer: rewards.

In March 2018, Lao Mao’s EosLaoMao was the first to put that promise in its campaign announcement. After being elected, it returned half of its distributable earnings to the top 50 voters. EOS Alliance followed suit, then EOSFans, then EOS Cannon. BM and Thomas Cox, who was in charge of the community, both publicly said this violated the EOS Constitution. But the rules were never changed. The election went ahead as usual, with 180 candidates.

An election that was supposed to be about technology and who could produce blocks reliably turned into a contest over rebates. That was all there was to it. It wasn’t about morality; it was that number 30.

The mainnet launched on June 1, 2018. There were 21 seats and 180 contenders.

You can work out what a seat was worth. One percent of the supply was issued each year, or about 10 million EOS, distributed among the nodes. At the time, each EOS was worth $9.50. That meant the 21 operators shared 600 million yuan a year, or 28 million yuan each.

The barrier to entry was clearly stated: a machine with 128 cores and 2 TB of memory, costing 759,000 yuan a year to rent. A team from Wenzhou said it was entering the race with 4.4 billion yuan in funding. Huaxi Village also signed up. Back then, everyone believed this was Blockchain 3.0, an Ethereum killer. It really looked like it was going to make it.

The turn came very quietly. On September 30, 2019, the U.S. SEC issued an order finding that the company had conducted an unregistered securities offering in 2017 and 2018.

The fine was $24 million, or 0.57% of the amount raised. The order stated that the company agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying the findings. A group of investors also filed a class-action lawsuit. It was settled in 2021, with $27.5 million paid. Together, the two amounts came to less than 1.3% of the funds raised.

The reason the payout was so small was that, legally, no one was found to have been defrauded. The SEC’s finding was that the offering was unregistered, not that it was a fraud. That was the crucial point: the books were clean, so there really was no need to pay up.

“Without admitting or denying” looks like mere wording, but it was the dividing line in the whole case. It let the question of intent slip entirely out of the picture, leaving every later civil claim to climb that mountain on its own.

The second half played out at another company. In May 2021, the company bundled 164,000 Bitcoin, $100 million in cash, and 20 million tokens into a new corporate shell called Bullish, also registered in the Cayman Islands.

On August 13, 2025, Bullish listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BLSH. It priced its shares at $37; they opened at $90.

They touched $118 during the day, and the IPO raised more than $1 billion. People who had bought EOS had no stake in that deal.

At the end of 2021, the 21 nodes voted to stop the tokens that had been released to Block.one every second. The community finally pushed the company out. Three years too late—the money had already left the chain.

The aftermath is tangible. For anyone still holding the old coins in a wallet, the official conversion portal is open: EOS can be exchanged for A at a one-to-one rate, with no deadline. Two-way conversion was available for only four months, starting May 14, 2025. After that, you can only convert EOS to A, not back again. Binance and Kraken converted them for users automatically. Coinbase didn’t, leaving people to do it themselves—or forget about it and let the coins sit there.

There’s one thing we can’t make out. When those coins were moved from the Cayman company into Bullish, what price were they assigned? The public documents only say “seeded with.” There’s no basis for the valuation, and no one has come forward to explain it. In any case, a large chunk of the money raised turned into these coins. What they were worth later, and whose books they ended up on, no one can say for sure.

BTC is now at $81,500. A is at 9.5 cents. The EOS chain is still producing blocks, one round every 63 seconds. The money is gone; the chain is still alive.

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