Don’t celebrate RadioShack’s crypto pivot — it’s just a Tai Lopez scheme
Apex slimebag Tai Lopez — infamous for bragging about his lavish lifestyle — is now appropriating RadioShack’s name as a smokescreen for a dodgy initial coin offering (ICO).
Once a retailer vending cables and electronics, RadioShack is rebranding as a crypto exchange and issuing its own token, RADIO.
Lopez’s venture unit Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV) bought RadioShack out of bankruptcy last November, and Lopez himself will control the largest amount of RADIO tokens on launch.
He’s also the founder of crypto project “Atlas Universal Store of Value” (USV), a token that will supposedly help bootstrap RadioShack’s pivot to digital assets.
Self-help peddler Lopez and his business partner Alex Mehr founded USV late last year. They claim it will somehow underpin a token swap market, and its website promises rewards at “over 150% per year.”
Lopez and Mehr have pegged RadioShack’s upcoming exchange as the “lowest hanging fruit among the many DeFi opportunities.”
Lopez is even the largest beneficial owner of the majority of RadioShack’s “partners,” including DressBarn, Linens & Things, Ralph & Russo, Stein Mart, and Pier1.
None of those companies have any history in technology at all, let alone crypto.
Tai Lopez wants to you to enrich himself
Skeptics quickly connected the dots between RadioShack’s announcement and Lopez’s entities. Through USV and REV, Lopez and his business partners control the entire offering.
In doing so, Lopez joins a long line of online gurus selling crypto assets to fans.
USV’s convoluted whitepaper includes quotes from historical figures ranging from Charles Darwin to evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Buss.
“This is a living, evolving protocol. More details will be added to the docs over time as the USV ‘Skynet’ becomes a sentient being. Ask Elon,” it reads.
RadioShack’s website already features a prominent warning of imposters creating fake social media accounts to promote phoney RADIO tokens.
Beyond this notice, RadioShack’s front page promotes USV. As for RadioShack’s token, RADIO, its whitepaper tries to make the point that other DeFi projects misunderstand the science of crowds.
It claims that USV gains a competitive edge using advanced behavior economics. Indeed, there are many unanswered questions about Lopez’s cryptocurrencies.
No one knows how many developers and employees are working on USV and the RadioShack exchange, what their minting process is, how the treasuries will be used, nor the exact amount of tokens Lopez and his friends will receive.
For what it’s worth TokenSniffer‘s automated audit rates USV rates as a ‘High Risk” of being a scam or becoming one in the future.
USV allegedly plagiarizes code from other, similar projects. It only changes the name on the contract.
Read more: [BitClout’s creator didn’t raise $200M for a ‘new’ blockchain — it’s the same old shit]
Indeed, for years Lopez has promoted endless varieties of ‘get rich quick‘ courses. Reviewers have (at their most charitable) called the classes high-priced and questioned his disingenuous marketing tactics.
But we’ve heard this story before. To similar media fanfare, photography company Kodak announced “KodakCoin” in 2018, a token pitched to streamline payments for licensed photographs.
KodakCoin never launched, but the announcement did briefly send its stock price from $3 to $13. Today, Kodak shares languish below $5 — 80% below its $26.50 IPO price from 2013.
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