Busted! Waltonchain Caught In a Twitter Giveaway Scandal

A little-known China based cryptocurrency project called Waltonchain just got caught cheating on one of their Twitter giveaways.

Shortly after the winners were announced, the Waltonchain Twitter account itself posted a tweet celebrating that they had won the giveaway. This set off a firestorm of fury and suspicion, and now Waltonchain is under the microscope.

But what is Waltonchain? Is this event indicative of the project as a whole?

What is Waltonchain?

On first glance, the company's official website seems to be a pretty typical buzzword laden mess that doesn't really explain anything about what they're trying to do. When we attempted to download their white paper, we were met with dead links that went nowhere.

In its own words, Waltonchain describes itself as follows:

The realization of Value Internet of Things will create a brand new business ecosystem, based on organic integration of blockchain and Internet of Things. This will extend the blockchain technology from Internet to Internet of Things, which will in turn create a genuine, believable, traceable business model with totally shared data and transparent information, depending on the combination of RFID technology and Waltonchain. Waltonchain team has formulated a 4-phase development plan, starting from infrastructure platform establishment to gradually incorporating retail, logistics and product manufacturing, and to finally achieving the full coverage of business ecosystem.

Based on this, it seems that Waltonchain is attempting to make something in between Internet of Things, and an RFID tracking system. Although the links are dead, the white paper section says that they have two RFID projects with two Chinese companies.

Waltonchain appears to already be strengthening its ties with the Chinese government as well, by making partnerships with various state owned enterprises. This makes sense as a few members listed on the team page are ranking officials in the Chinese government.

Aside from the various dead links, the text on the official website is laden with grammar errors and other issues that could've easily been fixed by a properly skilled editor in just a few minutes. This lack of care and attention to detail could be telling, and indicative of the project leaders mentality towards accuracy.

Based on the experience listed on the team page, it is conceivable that Waltonchain is focused more on supply chain tracking.

The big mistake

On its Twitter page, the company was arranging to have a giveaway of Waltonchain tokens. Unfortunately for them, shortly after the announcement was released, the Waltonchain account itself released the following tweet.

The public at large immediately suspected that the giveaway was fraudulent, and that Waltonchain employees failed to switch accounts to one that would be a designated fake winner. In response to this event, Waltonchain released an apology other twitter which states that a Waltonchain employee participated in the giveaway and ended up winning.

This employee, they claim, excitedly posted that tweet without changing to their own personal account. It should also be noted that this giveaway was not a single winner take all type event. Instead, there was a pool of 564.96 tokens to be given out, and the allegedly employee in question won 2.14 tokens.

The company also released a video of their alleged selection process being done live on a computer. Many skeptics on Twitter, however, were quick to point out that this could easily be faked, and without seeing the code we have no idea how the selection was made.

Will this kill Waltonchain?

While the sentiments on Twitter seem furious at best, it's difficult to say whether or not this single event will kill Waltonchain. Prices for individual units have taken a hard dip since news of the scandal broke.

Prices went from around $22 and then dipped sharply to $17 before flattening out at just under $19 as of this writing. This suggests that the community has not completely given up on the project. Prices have taken a hit, however, and so it's clear that this event did not go unnoticed.