Using the news a few years ago to raise the price of the currency and secretly transfer funds, the project was questioned by the community.

San Francisco-based payment startup Metal Payments raised about $3 million in the June 2017 token sales event. The company has been repeating the old news, probably to raise the price of its falling MTL.

At the same time, the startup was accused of abusing its diminishing funds, cashing in and investing in suspicious projects.

Metal Payments was founded by Marshall Hayner in April 2016. The company promises to create 66,588,888 tokens and distribute them to the founders and consultants for about $0.05. The number of tokens per project is 21,088,888 ( Approximately $10,544,444); 3,378,000 to the founding team; and 13,378,888 (approximately $6,689,444) donated to an app development fund.

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In addition, Metal Payments said it will “reserve” two funds: 2,000,000 MTLs for the Foundation Foundation for charitable projects; and 26,341,112 for the “Posted Payment Pool Proof” (PoPP) mechanism for rewards The user who made the payment.

On September 8, 2018, the MTL price was $14, and the funds held by the project reached $364 million in the short term.

But by February of this year, MTL prices had fallen sharply, and MTL holders noticed that funds began to withdraw quickly from the PoPP pool, faster than the one announced in the white paper. It was not until April of this year that Hayner disclosed in an article that he had allocated funds from the PoPP pool and foundation to fund the “core team”. Subsequently, Metal Payments executives began to transfer the funds and sell them on the market.

MTL holders are confused. An investor wrote on the company's Discord channel:

“These resources were originally unmovable, and up to 7,200 tokens were taken every day so that the PoPP pool could continue to operate.”

Another user said:

“It’s not cool to extract data from foundations and PoPP pools. I think this is illegal.”

According to Etherscan, more than 2.8 million MTL tokens have been transferred out of the PoPP pool over the past 30 days, worth about $1 million. In May of this year, the company acquired "Crumbs", the amount is unknown, this small investment app has stopped operating, Hayner has previously invested in it, which caused further concerns of MTL users.

Although the MTL price has risen slightly in the past month, it is only half the price in April.

Today, Metal is clearly doing everything it can to reinvigorate its falling currency. In the past few weeks, the company has been re-publishing old announcements frequently through one of its leading investors, the popular “juvenile bitcoin millionaire” Erik Finman – some of which date back to 2017 – leading to MTL The price soared.

This method works.

For example, on August 19th, Finman announced the launch of the "Metal Pay" app, positioning it as a competitor to Facebook's digital currency Libra. Affected by this news, the price of MTL rose from 0.3 US dollars to 0.34 US dollars, but in fact Metal Pay has been online since September last year.

At the same time, on August 21, Finman announced that MTL will be on the line – it is generally announced that the price of cryptocurrencies on the exchange will rise to varying degrees. The news once again lifted the company's currency price from $0.36 to $0.46 – but in fact, MTL has been on the line since October 2017.

Metal has packaged old news into news again and again. Finman announced on August 24 that Metal is recruiting, but related job postings have been posted online for several months. On August 25th, Finman announced that Metal will move into a new office, but the company has been here since March. (A Metal spokesperson said that Finman meant not to stay in the new office, but to organize and decorate the original office for public display and video visits.)

In the past 30 days, the price of MTL has increased slightly, but the amount of tokens remaining in the PoPP pool has been further reduced.

Decrypt (original media) contacted Metal Payments, a spokesperson explained that many duplicate statements are for new users. That's true – these “new users” are mentioned for the online coin, Finman's video and accompanying press releases. But Finman's tweets are still misleading: "Declaration: We are on the line."

Decrypt also mentioned Finman's "announcement" about Metal Pay, which was actually released at the end of last year. In response, the spokesperson said that the initial launch was actually the "beta" version of Metal Pay. But the original press release and Finman's statement did not mention the beta version. When asked about the matter, the spokesman did not comment further.

As of press time, neither Finman nor Hayner commented on this.

Of course, in the field of cryptocurrencies, it is nothing new to promote investor morale through some exaggerated means of propaganda. For example, IOTA announced a partnership with Microsoft at the end of 2017, but in fact it only subscribed to Microsoft's online cloud service Azure.

But blatant behavior like Metal Payments is indeed a good case study.

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