Since my life became vastly more complicated in October of last year, I’ve wondered if I should make a post detailing what actually happened, and my side of the story. I have seen article after article come out about me, wild speculations, hateful attacks and far more. Not once have I seen anything that even comes close to the truth, and I’ve decided it is time to put my story out there.
Where should I start? Well, my name is Ryan Kennedy – legally, lawfully and whatever else you can think of; and I am the founder and former CEO of Moopay LTD (moolah.io – I’ll call it both Moopay and Moolah in this article) – a consumer and business financial platform for digital currencies, that very rapidly became one of the biggest businesses in the digital currency space. I officially launched the company in January of 2014, and at the time we were based out of Switzerland. In the space of 9 short months, we had grown to a user base of several hundred thousand customers – with an employee base of roughly 20 people. As multinational startups go, we were fairly successful, and had shunned traditional funding in favour of a crowdfunded model. We got by on far less money than any other business in the industry, and we were doing very well.
Now, the whole time this was going on – on legal advice I decided to use a professional alias via a formal change, in order to protect myself and my employees from threats and more. With the amount of threats and harassment received by people working in this particular industry, it seemed prudent. As a result, Alex Green came to fruition. There was nothing special about the name, it was simply picked out of thin air – despite claims that I had stolen the identity of another person (I could have picked any name, somebody else would have that name).
In August of 2014, we were approached by a competitor that functioned as a trading exchange / platform for digital currencies with a view to acquiring them – following an attack on their platform that had led to roughly $2M USD worth of digital currency being stolen. Negotiations were swift, and at the conclusion – MintPal LTD had been acquired by Torihiki LTD, a company that was formed solely for the purpose of the acquisition (with a view to Moopay LTD then taking over past this).
Business was good, and was only getting better. Then, in October – it completely crashed. October 3rd, to be precise. Not long before we had released a completely rebuilt version of the MintPal platform, and it turned out that it had a few major exploits.
While away on a trip with two employees, an audit revealed that the platform was insolvent. There were numerous public reports that people were receiving double withdrawals, and for each person publicly admitting this – there were likely 10 more who weren’t. At this point, we shut the platform down and announced a closure of the business; with an immediate refund and withdrawal process put in place to people. Shortly after this, I and one of my employees (who I had ended up in a relationship with, and at the time – we were very happy) were accused of stealing roughly 3700 BTC (with a market value of roughly £825,100 at the time). This number was pulled out of thin air in relation to a one time transaction between the former owners of MintPal LTD, and Moopay LTD, as a part of the transition. What it fails to take in to account is the fact that the hot wallet (which is what withdrawals are processed from) was refilled on numerous occasions. We had multiple large wallets on Moopay LTD, and withdrawals were processed at random from them. I personally had several thousand Bitcoin stored on my own platform, as I put my money where my mouth was. After the repeated refills, that 3700 BTC figure had dwindled greatly. Beyond this, Moolah was a far bigger company than MintPal, and had extremely high activity by customers.
Now, what happened after October 3rd? As proven by verifiable public ledgers (previously submitted as supporting evidence to a high court)…
Between October 3rd and October 14th 4,084 BTC worth of coins were withdrawn – with a value at the time of £894,406. I do not have rate information available for the remaining coins, but this is estimated to be an additional 2,500 BTC worth of coins due to the size of the VRC and DOGE holdings we had. In these 11 days, this would come to roughly 6,500 BTC worth of processed withdrawals, with a value of £1.5M GBP – and yes, a chunk of this were withdrawals directly in Bitcoin. During this time, there was a considerable amount of trading activity on the platform itself. This was before we were aware of any bug on the platform, and once we were aware – we switched to a withdrawal request model. At this stage, a total of 2,684 BTC worth of coins was manually refunded to customers by myself – with a total value of £588,184. For the coins where I no longer have the rate information available due to heavy handed tactics by the police, roughly an additional 350 BTC was refunded. That would mean the following in terms of withdrawals and refunds processed since October 3rd.
Coin Value Returned
9,618 BTC
GBP Value Returned
£2,106,342
Roughly how many claims submitted have been verified and shown to be true?What is their total value? I am accused of having stolen essentially everything on MintPal LTD, but if that is the case, how exactly did I return over £2M GBP in close to 10,000 BTC worth of coins? With an average price of £223 during this entire incident, 3700 BTC would translate to £825,100 – yet during 2014 I converted double this (close to £1.6M) as I liquidated my own holdings, while still processing withdrawals and refunds that equated to greater than this in total. I personally held several thousand Bitcoin, and decided to stop hoarding and start spending – at the time, my company was doing extremely well, Bitcoin that I had mined in the early days was now valuable, and it was time to enjoy life. I have been involved in Bitcoin since day one, and mining and trading since then.
Despite being heavily involved in numerous fundraising initiatives for third parties, the vast majority of them charity based – people instantly decided that I was an evil parasite who had been out to hurt people since day one. Despite being a driving force for digital currency, I was immediately cast as a villain. A civil case was brought against me, which ended up being fought to a standstill due to a lack of evidence against myself. The amount of accusations, allegations and false news stories being brought up by two-bit web based blogs and amateur journalistic outlets became too much to keep track of.
A few days before my birthday (in December), it ended up getting even worse. I’m lying in bed with my then partner (Chelsea Hopkins) when we are rudely awoken by the police in our bedroom. It seemed like half the damn force had shown up – we were dragged to a police station, and all of our belongings, cars, etc seized. They had shown up with a warrant for paperwork and hard drives, and ended up taking everything down to Christmas decorations that we had yet to unpack. The police consistently showed an extreme bias against me, a ridiculously heavy handed approach, and a desire to cause us extreme distress when there was no evidence against us, only allegations. They did not allow us a phone call, they did not allow us to contact anybody. Eventually we were bailed until March, and when March came and they had nothing on us? They bailed us again. Eventually, Chelsea left me. She never spoke to me again, and I don’t know whether the stress of it all caused her to snap, whether the police twisted her viewpoint, or whether she simply decided I was a bad person.
I know that I haven’t done anything wrong and while I have no faith in the police, I have faith in the overall justice system – and thankfully have a supporting pile of evidence stacked a mile high. The police were relying on character assassination more than anything else, which is quite simply pathetic. I am not a criminal, I am not on the run – I am simply somebody who has lost pretty much everything, and is trying to move on. If people don’t want to trust me or give me a chance, that’s fine – but they don’t have to go out of their way to try and ruin my life further.
I have some great friends now, thankfully. People that have stuck with me through all of this, and I’ve made some awesome new friends. I have some great ideas for the future, and I’m focusing more on my creative side as opposed to anything else.
I’m always happy to talk about this, just drop me a message. I’ll be publishing more details in the near future about the technical specifics, and the financial ledgers.
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Update
I’m now releasing the first of many ledgers and summaries of withdrawals and refunds.
Ledger #1
http://chopapp.com/#yca9edak
Summary #1
http://pastie.org/10390457
lumitastic 