Johnny and The Story of Three Little Pigs

This article covers three incidents involving Johnny and how he interacts with the community and other projects.

I’ve discussed Johnny a few times recently, and today is — I hope — the culmination of that, before I can move on to another subject. The three objectives of this article are:

• Determining Johnny’s involvement in the CupidEggs project
• Understanding the source of the ongoing conflict between The EgoVerse and Johnny
• Determining whether promises relating to the Power Hour Passes were kept

Before publishing this article, I made an effort to reach out to Johnny and offer him an opportunity to correct me or to provide clarifications. He responded, as he had done in the past, by avoiding the questions.

I appreciate him wanting me to learn, but I can confidently state that I’m capable of using SnowTrace

CupidEggs’ Straw House Blown Away

I’ve discussed my suspicious of Johnny being linked to CupidEggs here, here and here — I didn’t get a polite response from Johnny, and at the time I received no confirmation of my suspicions.

When I first noticed that royalties from the CupidEggs project were going to Johnny, I thought he was the creator of the project. In the above linked threads, I asked him on many occasions if he was, and he refused to answer.

In doing some digging, I found it peculiar that, post-mint, the address for royalties changed from an unknown address to Johnny’s — He initially wasn’t receiving any royalties. Here is the transaction for the change:

https://snowtrace.io/tx/0x8dbfcbd929c6c9b013112f9559246993e26be6c4937d5f5a0e811a2a92d681b8

In total, the first address collected ≈2 AVAX in royalties, and Johnny’s address collected ≈7 AVAX.

This week, I was able to discuss with someone who worked closely with Johnny and CupidEggs, someone who asked that I don’t name them. This person provided DMs which paint a clearer picture of what happened.

The following exchanges show that:

• Johnny is not the creator of CupidEggs.
• Johnny’s team created the contract for CupidEggs.
• Without CupidEggs’ permission, Johnny changed the royalties of the contract so that they would go solely to him.
• When confronted, Johnny agreed to make the royalties 50/50.
• Johnny never changed the royalties to 50/50. 100% of royalties are still going to him.

This explains why CupidEggs disappeared — They didn’t want to continue de project if they got no royalties.

Unless Johnny can provide another explanation, this essentially amounts to theft on his part. Again, Johnny refused to comment.

Address changed without CupidEggs’ autorisation

Change was done at Johnny’s request

Johnny promises to do 50/50

50/50 change was never put in place

EgoVerse’s House Shaken with Accusations

There has been an ongoing public feud between Johnny and The EgoVerse, and this week, a (now deleted) thread was confusing for many members of the community, so I took it upon myself to dig deeper into the whole situation and communicate to people what was going on.

There have been many events involving the two parties. They mostly amounted to interpersonal conflicts — them not liking each other. I won’t touch on that. The objective of this article is not to take sides and say which group of people I find more personable. I want to stick to facts as much as possible.

Johnny has often accused EgoVerse of having stiffed him of money/AVAX he was due. EgoVerse claims he is lying. This is the primary source of the conflict between the two parties.

EgoVerse and Johnny first started working together from mid-April to beginning of June. Johnny’s position was Marketer. He was meant to be the Public Relations member of the team, responsible for social media marketing.

Johnny claims that he left EgoVerse because they did not pay him. EgoVerse claims that the agreement they had was that his pay (120 AVAX) would come from revenue from the upcoming Alter Ego Hunters mint, which is scheduled for September. I took the time to ask other members of EgoVerse what their arrangement is regarding pay, all of them say they have the same agreement — That their pay will come from the Alter Ego Hunters mint (other than a small amount that was given from the Yobi mint). Assuming Johnny’s agreement was structured the same as the rest of the team, he would have also been told that. Unfortunately, negotiations were done verbally, so there is no written agreement that EgoVerse could provide, and Johnny refused to give further comments.

Will Power Hour Passes’ House of Sticks Stand?

Several people have asked me to look into the Power Hour Passes, claiming they weren’t getting what was promised.

First of all, I found it very difficult to determine what was actually promised with Power Hour Passes. I couldn’t find any post that actually concretely detailed what they involved — Everything was kept vague (unless I missed a post). In short, I was able to piece together three things:

1. PH passes give access to whitelists
2. 22% of minting funds are to be returned to holders
3. A certain amount of funds (as we will see, the amount is unclear) from the secondary market’s royalties are to be used to airdrop funds to holders or to sweep floors

Whitelists

These are the projects I could find for which PH Pass holders were whitelisted. This list was mainly compiled from the announcements in the Power House Discord.

• Cupid Eggs
• Pixel Pops
• SmolBurgers
• BB Whales
• Red Chip Titans
• Mini Meta Cards
• Johnny’s Rockets

Sweeping floors and airdrops

Lets first determine how much Johnny made in revenue from the season one passes.

Revenue from mint:

• 101 Passes, 1 Avax per pass
• 40% of minting revenue went to Johnny (30% to artist, 30% to dev)
• Johnny received 40.4 AVAX

Revenue from royalties:

• Volume traded (Campfire): 258.56 AVAX
• Royalties: 10%
• Johnny received: 25.856 AVAX

The first promise was to use 22% of the minting funds to give back to holders. This was indeed done, giving 0.22 AVAX to each holder. This wallet was used to send the funds:

https://snowtrace.io/address/0x5a49cb71032af51ed98f6578627a090e6e0aeba4

Now, for the royalties. In my research, I was able to find two times when Johnny said how the funds were being used, and what amount. It varies from 4% of secondary sales to 100% of the funds obtained.

4% of royalties used to sweep or airdrop to holders

Here, he claims every dollar from PH was used for sweeps and airdrops

According to the Power House Pass Discord announcements, this is what was handed out:

• 2.5 AVAX (5x .5 AVAX)
• 1 Monkeez NFT (current floor — 0.77 AVAX)
• 1 CloudHeadz NFT(Current floor — 0.9 AVAX)
• 9 Amphibian Outlaws NFT (Minted for 3.78 AVAX total)
• 6 Bit Killas NFT (Minted for 2.1 AVAX total)
• 1 Seasons NFT (Current floor — 0.65 AVAX)
• 2 Cupcakes NFT (Current floor — 0.07 AVAX)
• 3 Mambonauts NFT (Current floor — 0.17 AVAX)
• 1 Beenz on Acid NFT (Current floor — 0.65 AVAX)
• 4 Fire Frens NFT (Current floor — 0.05 AVAX)
• 2 Creatures Of The Cave Two NFT (Current floor — 0.2 AVAX)
• 1 Mini Meta Cards NFT (Minted for 1.5 AVAX)
• 1 AVAX Boba Drinks NFT (Current floor — 0.05 AVAX)
• 1 Evil Beanz NFT (Current floor — 0.078 AVAX)

With these NFTs, it’s hard to calculate how much value was handed out. For some, I was able to give a mint value since he gave them away shortly after minting. For the others, I’m going with floor value, but I’m not certain that’s fair since a lot of these NFTs are low volume/illiquid (meaning, even if you list them at floor, nobody is buying them).

Calculating everything above, using floor value for most, gives a value of ≈14.16 AVAX.

Johnny made 40.4 AVAX from the mint, of which he gave 22 AVAX in the post-mint drip.

As for secondary sales, he made 25.86 AVAX in royalties. I currently have several addresses of Johnny’s tagged, and none of them have swept the floor, as he claims. Johnny claims above: “PH pass which every dollar I swept floors and airdropped”. Unless I am missing something, that would seem false. He also claimed in another instance that “4% of the sales go back into sweeping or drip”. 4% of sales is equal to ≈10.5 AVAX. You could argue that he airdropped that in value in NFTs. I would personally disagree with that argument because many of the NFTs were low volume, low liquid at the time of being dropped. Few were dropped while there was still active demand for them. Still, I can understand and somewhat agree with the point.

On a side-note, in looking in the announcements and comparing on-chain, I also found something interesting. This is one of his posts announcing an airdrop for holders of certain passes, drawn at random.

Each of the numbers that I marked in red received no airdrops following this announcement. Only 2 received airdrops of NFTs:

• #49 received 1 NFT (Amphibian Outlaw)
• #29 received 4 NFTs (Mambonaut, Fire Frens, Evil Beanz, Boba Drinks)

Again, as with every time I asked Johnny, he refused to answer questions.

Final thoughts

I often get told, stop looking into scams that amount to little AVAX — focus on the big rugs. But I think we need to focus on both — The big rugs are absolutely more damaging, but once they have occurred, there is usually little we can do other than analyze what happened.

In a case like this one, the objective is preventative, not corrective. We should want to spot the unethical and unhealthy behaviour early, before it gets out of hand. If we let it slide now, we imply that it is okay for Johnny to change a contract without a creator’s permission, or to mislead people with false claims to the community. You don’t want people’s first experience with Avalanche to be with someone who is fine with this behaviour. If we want to grow the ecosystem, we need to address these issues and rally together for a healthy environment.