There have been some very questionable things going on with Substratum over the past few weeks.
Recently, Substratum has been ramping up ETH withdraws, cutting employees, and making changes to their website that suggest the groundbreaking and the Earth-shattering V1 release will not “save SUB”.
Substratum is Painfully Low on Funds
Substratum has been running very low on funds, with their current Ethereum reserves totaling a mere 3,199 ETH. This number has been met in light of cutting several longtime employees, including one core team member and co-founder, and a long absence of the main figurehead, Justin Tabb.
Community members alike have noted how the team “has plenty of funds”, but if this really were the case (which it’s not), why have there been several employees leave Substratum to pursue other endeavors?
Examining Substratum’s ETH reserves for project funding reveal a few things. The team has a rolling monthly liquidation pattern of about $125-150k to cover operational costs and pay its employees. As it currently stands, with only 3,199 ETH left, Substratum has maybe 3 months left before it will no longer be able to sustain development.
Substratum will not have enough time to turn everything around and become cash-flow positive either. Unless Substratum gets millions of users for V1 right out of the get-go, Substratum will be forced to shut down in the near future.
Substratum Cuts Several Employees
Curious about Substratum’s total number of employees, I decided to check their LinkedIn. For reference, Justin Tabb has given a figure of their current employee count in late December of 2018, when he inevitably failed to deliver on his over-hyped V1 promise.
According to LinkedIn, Substratum has lost roughly 9 of the 27 employees Justin Tabb tweeted about in December of 2018. In particular, B.J. Allmon, one of Substratum’s core team members and “Co-Founder” is no longer listed as such. In addition, one of Substratum’s very first hires has completely left the company. My guess is Kristen Smith didn’t like the prospect of working alongside a known Pump and Dumper and developing “blockchain content delivery” anymore.
Substratum’s Website Changes and Whitepaper Removal
Recently, Substratum changed their team member’s section of their website. This page was actually removed off the main website, but, it was clearly accessible via direct URL. A few questions arise to the curious observer as to why this was still accessible via direct URL and more importantly, the technological capacity of a team who raised nearly $14 million.
I’m just going to say this. If you raised nearly $14 million from the public and don’t know how to fully delete a menu item off WordPress, how in the world would you expect to provide “blockchain content delivery” and decentralize the web? This is laughable at best.
As of yesterday, Substratum has now completely deleted their team member page and you get a 404 error when trying to access it. Additionally, Substratum’s whitepaper is no longer accessible. These changes to their website and subsequent removal altogether, Justin Tabb’s prolonged absence, loss of employees, and ramping up of ETH withdraws, suggest two things.
- Substratum is beginning to distance their relationship to Justin Tabb, who has effectively led the project to its demise. This is evident when they began removing all the previous “Co-Founder’s” from several core team members bios. Only Justin Tabb was mentioned as a “Founder” before they took the entire page down.
- Shutting down in the near future is a very strong possibility and something is brewing in Substratumville.
In response to criticism on Substratum silently changing their website yesterday, Substratum’s CIO had a few things to tell the community.
“Some of these Crypto Currency blogs and forums are laughable. Make a few changes on your website and suddenly entire articles are making predictions and analysis on those changes. Stop reading tea leaves. We tweet everyday and provide detailed progress updates every week”.
Twitter
So, let me get this straight. Substratum’s CIO is now posting GIF’s and claiming removing one of their Co-Founder’s and subsequently deleting the entire team section is just “tea leaves”. I feel bad for anyone still holding this project..
“Neither, it was a decision I made. Although we are very active on twitter and linked in, several team members were getting personally harassed and doxed. We’ve been making small changes to our messaging and public website. The direction of our product was not inline with our website. More changes coming soon, so I assume brace yourselves”.
Telegram
Quote me on it.
Conclusion
Something is brewing behind the scenes in Substratumville and judging from employees being cut, money running low, it’s likely not going to be good. Substratum has shown other projects how to carefully choose your leadership and just exactly what an incompetent team looks like.
The majority of the crypto community consensus is Substratum is a complete joke and time will tell who’s around long enough to tell the tale.
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