Big promises and even frauds abound in the free-wheeling crypto world.
Last month, Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign manager, and White House strategist, announced his involvement in a new business aimed towards Joe Biden detractors and Donald Trump supporters: a cryptocurrency. He and another ex-Trump adviser, Boris Epshteyn, boasted that they had taken a "strategic ownership position" in the cryptocurrency $FJB. Fuck Joe Biden is the abbreviation for "f** Joe Biden."
Bannon began promoting the coin, which they both held considerable amounts of, as a "currency for the MAGA movement" on his show. Epshteyn praised the $FJB coin as a means to enable Trump supporters to "let your feelings, your primal rejection, your fundamental disgust with Biden be heard" during one show. Buyers of $FJB, on the other hand, should be cautious. Not only does each purchase increase the value of Bannon's and Epshteyn's holdings, but crypto experts say the currency is built in such a way that its managers have an uncommon level of discretion in preventing coin owners from selling their tokens—a power that might create investors difficulties.
It's shockingly simple to start a cryptocurrency. Write a little code, hire a programmer to do it for you, or copy and change some code from somewhere else, and you've got yourself a new currency. Grant Training, a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, first generated $FJB in October. The coin was first known as the Let's Go Brandon coin, following the slogan that conservatives have adopted as code for FJB. According to the coin's website, nearly 8,000 people own it.
The $FJB code allows the currency's operators to manually lock an owner's token balance, which is rare in a field that strives to avoid centralized authority. According to Simon de la Rouviere, who studied the code for Mother Jones, this would preclude an owner from selling coins. De la Rouviere is a digital artist and co-author of ERC-20, a coding standard for programming contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, which supports Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Bitcoin.
This restriction does not apply to the operators of $FJB, according to De la Rouviere. "They have the freedom to transfer as much as they want, anytime they want," he explains. According to De la Rouviere, if the price of $FJB began to fall, the coin's operators may block some token holders from selling to prevent a further downward spiral, while remaining free to sell their own tokens. By the time-locked investors regained access, their tokens may have lost a significant amount of value.
An engineer with experience at major crypto companies reviewed the currency's code and agreed with de la Rouviere, confirming that "there is a lock that can arbitrarily be placed on almost any address," except the $FJB operators' address, who asked not to be identified for professional reasons.
Cryptocurrency protocols often include locks as an "anti-whale" feature, ostensibly to limit the impact of large investors. However, unlike other cryptocurrencies with triggers that impose locks on holders attempting large transactions, $FJB's operators can choose which wallets to lock manually. "It would have been preferable if it had been an automated process," adds de la Rouviere. "It's just lousy coding," says the author.
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