On the Ethereum DApp user list and Gas consumption list, a project named Forsage (Chinese name Fossaki) has occupied the top three positions in the list for a long time since the beginning of the year, with the highest number of transactions in a single day exceeding 40,000. The address exceeds 20,000, the total participating address exceeds 1.1 million, and the capital participation value exceeds 300 million US dollars. Investors who often check information on the Ethereum-related data website this year may have seen this name, and if you learn more about it, you may know that it is capital However, most of them don’t know much about how Forsage works and why it attracts a large user base.
The chain catcher learned that the Forsage project was initiated by Lado Okhotnikov, who is said to be a Russian resident, in early February this year. It is a pyramid-like project that uses Ethereum smart contracts. Users join the program after paying a certain amount of ETH to the smart contract. Obtaining commission rewards by inviting more users to pay ETH to the smart contract has an obvious nature of MLM, but the more critical reason for its popularity lies in the design of dual matrices and falling rewards.
In August and September of this year, the Forsage project began a large-scale promotion in China, through various channels such as offline and offline to induce people to participate in the project. At present, domestic participants are expected to exceed 30,000, which has caused a large number of participants to suffer losses.
Author/Gong Quanyu
01
The design of the fund game
Forsage's popularity is not only to move the common multi-level distribution network to the Ethereum smart contract, but also to make full use of the characteristics of the smart contract to stimulate the psychological weakness and enthusiasm of participants to the greatest extent.
According to various information, users to participate in the Forsage project first need to open the link from the superior recommender and pay 0.05 ETH to the Forsage smart contract. The smart contract does not deposit any funds, but divides this part of funds into two parts. The x3 matrix and the x4 matrix are automatically transferred to the Ethereum wallet of the superior or higher recommender, that is, each has 0.025 ETH.
Promotional materials for domestic communities
Different matrices have different operating mechanisms. The x3 matrix is designed with 3 points under each user ID, that is, three recommended positions. The 0.025 ETH of the first two recommenders will be directly transferred to the recommender's wallet Address, the funds of the third recommender will be automatically transferred to the user address of the higher recommender of the recommender. After that, the recommended users will repeat this process, that is, the bonus for every two downline development goes to themselves, and the reward for every third downline development goes to their superior.
The design of the x4 matrix is that each user ID has 6 recommender points, the 0.025 ETH of the first 2 recommenders will be transferred to the wallet address of the user’s online recommender, and the development of the third, fourth, and fifth recommenders The funds belong to the user, and the funds of the sixth recommender will be randomly transferred to the user's wallet at a nearby point.
Although the threshold for entering this capital plate is 0.05ETH, the two matrices also have 12 levels respectively. The threshold ranges from 0.05ETH and 0.1ETH up to 51.2ETH. The capital threshold for each level is two of the previous level. Every time the user invests an ETH, it will be transferred to the wallet of a higher-level recommender according to the aforementioned mechanism.
The mechanism for Forsage to induce users to invest more ETH and increase the matrix level is that if a user’s matrix level is lower than its offline level, the reward from the offline will bypass the user’s wallet and "slide down" to the recommended level. High, matrix level not lower than the user’s online wallet.
For example, if a user only subscribes to a 0.5ETH level matrix, if his downline invests 3.2 ETH to open a higher level matrix, then the downline's fund allocation will completely bypass the user, resulting in a similar cryptocurrency "FOMO" psychology in the trading field.
Stimulate users to join through compelling data on the official website
In this case, the income of Forsage users after investing in participation can come from two parts. One part is the so-called dynamic income, which is the reward derived from directly recommending users, requiring a lot of effort to expand offline; the other part is the so-called As long as the user’s activated matrix level is high enough and a certain number of downlines have been developed, there may be cases where the downline is further developed and the matrix level is lower than the lower downline, then you can enjoy "Slippage" income to these offline.
More specifically, Forsage has the following characteristics compared to the past MLM and capital fund projects: It has a very low funding threshold, claims that "you can participate in international projects in a few hundred", and then adopt various mechanisms in the future. Stimulate investment; the hierarchical relationship is not directly related to the level of income. Users can increase the possibility of "blocking" slipping rewards by opening a higher-level matrix; claiming that there is no risk of fund precipitation or collapse based on smart contract operation.
From the above point of view, Forsage has the characteristics of a pyramid scheme and a capital market. Participants do not directly create any value, but obtain benefits through the development of offline user participation, but it is not strong in market expansion and late-stage participants Unfavorable, it is very likely that the return will be lower than the input.
Nevertheless, due to Forsage’s relatively new gameplay mechanism, it quickly became popular in some regions, especially starting in May and June this year. The project has caused widespread dissemination and participation in relatively underdeveloped areas such as the Philippines and Indonesia. Most dates There are more than 10,000 active addresses.
At the same time, the expansion of these marketing activities has also greatly stimulated the market's purchase demand for ETH. Its explosive growth trend from June to August is also related to the price trend of ETH in the middle of this year. Wan Hui, the founding partner of Primitive Ventures, said on Twitter that much of the vitality of the Ethereum network comes from Forsage, "tracking large-scale Ponzi schemes using cryptocurrencies has always been my best macro strategy."
At the end of June this year, the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission also issued a warning against the project, stating that an entity led by Lado Okhotnikov and operating under the name of Forsage was found to be engaged in investment activities in the Philippines that were not authorized by the Commission. Its plan clearly indicated a A possible Ponzi scheme in which the funds of new investors are used to pay “fake profits” to previous investors, which is detrimental to subsequent members of the field. The public is advised not to invest or stop investing in the project.
The chain catcher randomly performed statistics on 16 Ethereum addresses that participated for more than 20 days in the Ethereum browser (see the figure below), and found that more than half of the addresses are in a state of loss, and the absolute profit amount of most profitable users is not high. Huge gap level.
However, since the beginning of September, Forsage's data on the Ethereum network has shown a rapid decline, and the active addresses on most dates are between 1000-2000. This is partly because the project officially launched a new version of Forsage on TRON to reduce the potential impact of the excessively high Gas fee on the Ethereum network on new users. At the same time, it also introduced a new gameplay called xGOLD.
However, from the data of the TRON browser, the average daily active address of the Forsage TRON version is also between 1000-2000, and the sum of the data from Ethereum is also far lower than the daily activity of over 20,000 at its peak.
02
How to enter China
Although Forsage's official website has 8 language versions, there is no Chinese page for a long time, which also caused the early development of the project in the Chinese market to be very slow.
But since the beginning of August, an organization called the "Magic Leopard Alliance" began to build momentum for the Forsage project on a large scale, sorting out a large amount of Chinese information about Forsage and participating strategies. On the one hand, it held lines in Guiyang, Changsha, Chengdu and other central and western cities. The next activity, on the one hand, is to transform interested users through channels such as Weibo, the currency circle media website, and telegram groups, and organize a community to discuss Forsage.
Chaincatcher recently added a number of so-called community evangelists from Forsage through WeChat messages found in some online channels. They will publish wallet addresses in Moments and WeChat groups every day to receive screenshots of large amounts of "slipping down" ETH, as well as offline A picture of a promotional event, calling on everyone to "pick up Ethereum."
However, further analysis shows that these "big money" screenshots have a lot of tricks. According to the chain catcher reporter, many screenshots actually do not have a date to show. Different promoters use screenshots with exactly the same content on different dates to advertise in the Moments of Friends, making users receive a large amount of ETH "slipping" every day. Illusion.
However, according to the chain catcher reporter's observation, there are still many new users joining the community every day, with a total of more than 100 people joining the group in 2 days. The reporter also added a number of users in the group. There are many waiters and participants. Except for one participant who claimed to have earned a lot of ETH, the other two have not paid back.
Dandan (pseudonym), a participant familiar with Forsage, told Chaincatcher that he had learned about the project from friends in the crypto circle in Shenzhen at the end of August. At that time, he invested about 1.6 ETH, but then realized the project’s " After the essence of "pull the head", he did not continue to participate.
"For those of us who are knowledgeable and understand the blockchain, playing disk circle projects can have a higher rate of return. Forsage not only has low static income, but also hurts people." Dandan added, "For users outside the industry, smart Concepts such as contracts and decentralized wallets all have high barriers to entry, and the conversion rate will eventually be very limited, which is not a good project."
According to community publicity materials, Forsage currently has more than 30,000 participants in China. Considering that the project’s active address on the Ethereum browser and the number of transactions have not improved recently, it can be considered that Forsage is in China. Market expansion is not smooth, and the performance of the Forsage model in the global market is no different.
Ethereum browser statistics on Forsage contracts
Even so, Forsage has recently remained at the forefront of many important data lists of Ethereum. This not only reflects the embarrassment of Ethereum's application landing, but also reflects the helplessness of Ethereum as a decentralized platform that is inevitably used by some scams. It needs technology. Developers, regulators, media and other forces work together to solve these problems.
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