Four Red flags of Waqar Zaka's Crypto TenUp Nation
Four Red flags of Waqar Zaka's Crypto TenUp Nation
A crashing coin, a gambling app, ponzi staking and a one-man army behind the operations.
Disclaimers:
I am, what crypto bros call, a no-coiner or a normie. I am having a lot of fun staying poor looking at the shenanigans/scams/rug-pulls in the crypto sphere including but not limited to bitcoin, blockchain, web3, NFT, DeFi, etc.
Waqar Zaka has been in the crypto space for a long time. This post is about his recent TenUp venture.
Waqar Zaka makes more money in a month from just his Facebook group subscriptions than I make in years. His income from endorsement, YouTube channel, and referral fees from BitGet exchange is in addition to that.
This section is just a preamble about what I think of the wider crypto world including bitcoin. But if you want to read only about Waqar Zaka, skip this and move to next section.
Cryptos - a negative-sum game
Jorge Stolfi argues that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme:
A Ponzi scheme, or "ponzi" for short, is a type of investment fraud with these five features:
People invest into it because they expect good profits, and
that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,
there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead,
the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, while
the operators take away a large portion of this money.
Investing in bitcoin (or any crypto with similar protocol) checks all these items. The investors are all those who have bought or will buy bitcoins; they invest by buying bitcoins, and cash out by selling them. The operators are the miners, who take money out of the scheme when they sell their mined coins to the investors.
Features 3, 4, and 5 imply that investing in bitcoin, like "investing" in lottery tickets, is a very negative-sum game. Namely, at any time, the total amount that all investors have taken out is considerably less than what they have put into the scheme; the difference being the amount that the operators have taken out. Thus the investors, as a whole, are always in the red, and their collective loss only increases with time.
The expected profit from investing in such a scheme is negative. While some investors who cash out may make a profit, that comes at the expense of other investors, who will lose more than their "fair" share of the general loss above.
Robert McCauley argues that Bitcoin is worse than Madoff-style Ponzi scheme
By contrast to investments with Madoff, Bitcoin is bought not as an income-earning asset but rather as a zero-coupon perpetual. In other words, it promises nothing as a running yield and never matures with a required terminal payment. It follows that it cannot suffer a run. The only way a holder of bitcoin can cash out is by a sale to someone else.
He goes on to explain that bitcoin (and cryptos) is unlike a Ponzi and more like a pump-and-dump scheme.
In its cashflow, bitcoin resembles a penny-stock pump-and-dump scheme more than a Ponzi scheme. In a pump-and-dump scheme, traders acquire basically worthless stock, talk it up and perhaps trade it among themselves at rising prices before unloading it on to those drawn in by the chatter and the price action. Like the pump-and-dump scheme, bitcoin taps into the pure desire for capital gains. Buyers cannot stand the sight of friends getting rich overnight: they suffer an acute fear of missing out (FOMO). In any case, bitcoin makes no promises and cannot end as a Ponzi scheme ends.
And finally Will Quin at David Gerard’s fantastic blog
But Bitcoin is not a fraud, because a fraud needs a perpetrator. Bitcoin was created as a sincere — if somewhat unhinged — political project, and operates independently of its creator. It’s a bad investment in the same way that a fraud is a bad investment, but it’s not a fraud.
In a twisted way, this is actually quite innovative. J.P. Koning conceptualises Bitcoin not as a bubble, but as an improvement on the traditional Ponzi scheme (or, as Preston Byrne called it, a Nakamoto Scheme). The cash flows are the same — later investors pay out early investors. But in a traditional Ponzi scheme, the person running it can abscond with everyone’s money, or the authorities can shut it down. With Bitcoin this is theoretically not a problem.
Of course, in practice most people use exchanges, and therefore face the exact same two risks. Still, gun to my head, I’d rather invest in Bitcoin than in a regular Ponzi.
So we have two possibilities:
Crypto was a stupider bubble than any previous bubble
Crypto was a smarter Ponzi than any previous Ponzi
And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
The aforementioned paragraphs mainly talk about bitcoin (the most respectable of all the shitcoins cryptos) but are equally applicable to the rest of the crypto-sphere.
Now that you know what I think about crypto, let's talk about Waqar Zaka’s crypto investing.
Flag 1: TenUp Coin
Waqar Zaka initiated a pump-and-dump on December 30, 2022 with the below tweet.
But before we analyze his trading prowess, let’s review the white paper that Waqar Zaka issued for this shitcoin. It is 18 pages of pure fluff. To give you an example, these are the vision and mission statements.
Next we find out about the philanthropist behind this venture who is none other than Waqar Zaka himself.
Kind of surprising that after nominating him as the crypto influencer of the year 2020, a few months later, Binance rug pulled him by one million dollars.
The entire White Paper is filled with such nonsense. You can read it yourself. After such tall claims, this is how the TenUp coin is performing as per the OKX exchange. After pumping the price to 0.54USDT on June 2021, it has steadily slumped such that the price now is 0.01743 USDT, a drop of 97%.
And when people asked him, why TenUp is down, he cites examples of Google, Tesla, etc.
TenUp is Waqar Zaka’s own coin whose price he can manipulate easily. If he can’t predict the price of his own highly illiquid and manipulatable coin, what skills does he have in predicting the future course of Bitcoin or Ethereum? Or may be he is such a scammer that he pulled the rug from under the investors in his own coin.
Please don’t ask Waqar Zaka any serious questions. One person, very humbly, asked him about his $1 million loss claim against Binance.
Right away, Waqar Zaka’s supporters jumped in to massage his ego.
Anyway, the point of this section was to show that he has his own coin TenUp which he has mainly used for pumping and dumping on his investors.
Flag 2: LudoNFT
Let’s look at Waqar Zaka’s NFT experience. The crypto expert of Pakistan got hacked out of his NFTs.
If you go to the above tweet, in all the quote tweets and comments, his chamchas supporters are tagging Opensea to somehow reverse the transaction. The crypto expert believes that in this way he can shame opensea into reversing the hack.
If you are interested, this is the transaction for the NFT.
The highlight in yellow is Waqar Zaka (10B7FA) buying the NFT for 0.360 ETH approximately $400. The highlight in blue is the hacker (D33665) transferring Waqar Zaka’s NFT to the hacker’s own account for zero dollar. And highlighted in pink is the hacker selling the NFT for 0.315 Wrapped ETH, pure profit for the hacker.
But crypto scammer getting scammed isn’t the funniest part. I hope you are wondering what was the picture he paid $400 for? Wonder no more. This is the picture.
The title of the picture is rektguy and ironically Waqar Zaka got rekt. Hahahahahaha…. man you can’t make this stuff up.
The other picture he bought for almost $1000 was this one.
In contrast, I didn’t have to pay anything for them. I just used the Windows snipping tool and voila, I added them here for free. You can do the same by pressing right click on your mouse. To be honest, I wouldn’t take this pictures if someone paid me for these.
Ok. Enough comedy. Back to the serious stuff. Under the TenUp umbrella, Waqar Zaka also launched Tenup Ludo NFT. There is a two-page “Lite Paper” (I’ll be damned if I knew what a lite paper is) explaining the NFT.
There is nothing web3 or decentralized or even about LudoNFT. It is a mobile Ludo game where you have to buy Tenup coins to participate in a ludo game with other players. The winner gets the coins of the losing players.
Ludo NFT is basically a gambling app masquerading as an online game.
Flag 3: Staking
At 15% APY, TenUp is clearly a scam. The only way it is possible to earn 15% APY on TenUp coin is if Waqar Zaka and his team are printing TenUp coins and giving them to the investors who have staked it with him hoping for a return. It’s not even a ponzi. It’s just printing funny money.
Flag 4: One-Man Army
As per the white paper
TenUpNation is determined to revolutionize the dynamics of blockchain technology. The community is well-versed in its goal of simplifying the much densely formulated code of conducts in the legislative focused world in view of that fact, we have come up with an upgraded version of TenUp. It consists of a lot more advanced opportunities in comparison with the old blockchain as it is launching ERC20 token based on Ethereum mainnet very soon floating it’s personalized Defi projects for instance world’s first Cricket NFT market place, LP tokens staking, TenUp Swap(DEX). Furthermore, TenUp Smart is also launching customized platforms such as P2P exchange and world’s first shariah compliance exchange.
You need a whole team to manage this. All I could find was this about the highest-paid Web3 CEO of Pakistan. He appears to be the one-man army managing the operations of the enterprise.
Conclusion
The purpose of this post was to highlight red flags in the TenUp endeavor and have a laugh. His crypto trading enterprise is much bigger than TenUp. This post isn’t investment advice. Please do your own research and if you think you can become rich quickly by investing with Waqar Zaka, please don’t let me stop you from getting FILTHY rich.
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Lastly, don’t miss this banger on TenUp coin