He said that yesterday he saw everyone sharing the screenshot of Maji's loss of 15 million US dollars on Friend. Many newcomers even laughed at him and called him a big leeks, but many old people were accustomed to his operation and joked that it increased the motivation for him to issue the next project to reap the benefits.
Suddenly I had an idea to sort out the history of Maji, a legendary figure in the cryptocurrency circle. On one hand, he can cut people and make them cry, and on the other hand, he can be cut and cry. What kind of person is he?
I collected some information and combined it with my own experience of participating in his project to write about my impression of @machibigbrother's big cut. I would like to thank @BTC__CEO for the detailed information in his previous post, which saved me a lot of trouble.
WHO is Machi?
Jeffrey Huang (November 7, 1972-), a Taiwanese-American male singer. He was born in Huwei Town, Yunlin County, but grew up in the United States. Because he didn't like studying, Huang Licheng stopped going to school after graduating from high school and started a hip-hop group with his brother Huang Lixing. Yes, that's the Huang Lixing who made movies and sang. In the early days, people in our Web3 circle said that Huang Licheng was Huang Lixing's brother, but later his fame in the circle greatly overshadowed his brother, and he had his own code name "Machi Big Brother", and his ENS machibigbrother.eth also became an address that many people paid attention to.
Why is he called Maji? He gave his own answer
Huang first gained attention as a founding member of the pop/rap trio L.A. Boyz, which he formed in 1991. L.A. Boyz was active from the early to late 90s, released 13 albums, and became increasingly popular in Asia before disbanding in 1997. After the success of L.A. Boyz, Huang Licheng formed the hip-hop group MACHI in 2003 and took the opportunity to make another fortune. Huang Licheng and his friends then began to form a multi-role Asian hip-hop/rap record label called MACHI, which was under the wing of Warner Music. Eventually, Huang Licheng transitioned from the music industry to the technology field, founding 17 Media (M17) in 2015 and later becoming one of the most popular live streaming apps in Asia.
There is one point I find very funny and would like to mention:
In 2015, his song "Dick" was removed from the shelves by the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China because it contained content that promoted obscenity, violence, incited crime, or harmed social morality.
Enter the cryptocurrency world
Brother Maji started his real performance after entering the cryptocurrency circle and won the title of "Big Cut"
Harvested from Mithril
In 2017, Huang Licheng began to be known in the circle mainly for the project he founded, Mithril, which was one of the earliest projects to use tokens as content creation rewards. In the ICO in February 2018, he raised 60,000 ETH, which was worth 51.6 million US dollars at the time, and sold 30% of the total token supply. 70% of these private sale tokens were unlocked at the TGE in February 2018, and the remaining 30% were planned to be unlocked in the next three months. In April 2018, Mithril was listed on the centralized exchange Bithumb. After the tokens were fully unlocked in May 2018, 89% of the circulating supply of MITH tokens were sold in a concentrated manner, and the huge selling pressure led to a crash.
I got to know Maji because of the Mithril project. At that time, Binance also launched $MITH. Based on my simple trust in CZ's coin selection, I tried to buy this token after the crash, but the dealer was dead. I left the market with a loss of 30% a few months later. I was deeply impressed.
But this is not the most outrageous thing. Binance listed MITH in November 2018, but it was not until December 2022 that Binance delisted MITH, which was undoubtedly a zombie token. It should be considered relatively durable. When Binance announced the delisting of Mithril MITH, the official Twitter account of Mithril, which had not been updated for two years, made an exception and spoke out, demanding that Binance return the deposit of 200,000 $BNB. This incident caused a lot of ridicule at the time. Not speaking out for two years, speaking out is asking for money on behalf of the community. This is really thick-skinned.
Formosa Finance transfers money and runs away
Huang then worked with Taiwanese politicians George Hsieh, Czhang Lin and Ryan Terribilini to found Formosa Financial, a financial management platform for blockchain companies. In this project, Huang was the chief consultant, but in the subsequent flow of funds, it was found that he was the boss behind the scenes.
This project raised funds in two rounds. In April 2018, it completed an angel round of financing with a total amount of 22,000 ETH. Subsequently, on May 31, a private placement raised another 22,000 ETH, accounting for 30% of the total token supply.
What’s amazing here is that a series of well-known investment institutions were involved in the big sale, including Binance, QCP Capital, Lemnis Cap, Block One, etc. However, the token FMF did not go on the top CEX as the team had guaranteed, but was listed on IDEX, one of the few DEXs at the time, in June, and the price plummeted as soon as it was listed. It was not until September that it was listed on two small CEXs (IDCM and UEX), and then it basically went downhill all the time.
What’s worse is that three weeks after the ICO, 22,000 ETH were withdrawn from the project wallet, many of which went to the wallets of people related to Huang, and many people in the team, including Huang, resigned. But this news was not announced to Formosa’s investors until 2019 through an anonymous email. However, considering that “Huang Licheng and George are well-known figures in Taiwan, and the incident occurred in multiple jurisdictions, the investors agreed to simply handle the incident to avoid some unnecessary troubles.”
I didn't benefit from this project, so I could only watch the fun and sigh that it turns out that Brother Maji's reputation can also ward off disasters, which is awesome.
Cream Finance hacked
DEFI started to heat up in 2020. Huang Licheng keenly noticed this hot spot and directly forked Compound Finance, the leading Defi lending platform at the time, to establish Cream Finance on BSC.
BSC was a hot new blockchain at that time, and the spirit of Fair Launch made people think that Big Brother Maji would not be able to raise money through ICO this time. However, Cream was hacked three times, causing users in the protocol to lose more than 192 million US dollars.
Of course, there is no evidence to prove that Brother Machi is directly related to the hacking incident, but the veterans of Defi know that many times the project is hacked because of the theft by the insiders, so Cream still becomes a mystery in Brother Machi’s dark history.
Cream still in Maji's wallet
My Big Lion community was probably one of the most active and well-known communities on the BSC chain at the time, and there were countless people who had fallen into the trap of Cream. I still have 0.01 BTC in Cream that I can’t get out, which reminds me to remember Big Brother.
Swag Finance
Swag was founded by Huang Licheng in August 2016. It was formerly a sub-brand of 17LIVE, specializing in live broadcasts by internet celebrities and managing the fan economy. However, as the platform's performance scale gradually moved towards adult content, it was changed to Asia's largest adult creation platform in December 2017.
Maji issued SWAG coins as governance tokens in October 2020. The slogan at the time was that if you have seen pirated performances of SWAG actresses before, then buy some SWAG coins as support. The most outrageous thing about Huang is that he actually let SWAG be used as collateral in CREAM, which caused controversy on the entire network. After all, a small garbage coin is still in circulation and the coin holding situation is extremely opaque, which poses a very high risk to other collateral.
As a result, the token plummeted as soon as it was launched, punishing all those who dared to rush into the second pool or secondary purchase. It was forced to be removed from CREAM and was directly abandoned and declined within a few weeks.
swag.live
You can still watch it now
Various imitations of hot spots
Brother Maji later launched several imitation projects based on the hot topics, such as:
In December 2020, MithCash, which took advantage of the popularity of algorithmic stablecoins, saw its TVL grow to US$1 billion in just a few days after its launch, and then quickly collapsed.
In January 2021, Typhoon Cash, which took advantage of the popularity of anonymous coin mining, claimed to be an anonymous project, but basically everyone could know that Brother Maji was the operator through various explicit and implicit hints. This project ended quickly within a few weeks as mining continued to sell off. Everyone who plays DEFI knows that if you want to make more money, you have to mine in Pool 2, but if the dealer starts to sell, the greedy miners in Pool 2 will be their liquidity when they exit.
In August 2021, Mud Games, a copycat of the Loot game concept, did not randomly generate asset NFTs, but instead the team quietly minted the rarest NFTs themselves.
In October 2021, Squid DAO, a copycat of OHM DAO, was shut down three months later.
Because it is difficult to locate the addresses of these projects, it is impossible to estimate how much money they have made, but there is no doubt that as traders they can make money, and retail investors are just trying to get the skin of a tiger.
I participated in almost all of these projects, but because I knew Maji's personality, I adopted a non-greedy strategy of early entry and early exit, and I did make some money. But some of my friends were cut off, and they kept getting cut off.
NFT Godfather and BAYC Bored Ape
This was the most influential stage for Brother Machi. He began to pay attention to the rise of NFT, and actively participated when BAYC just started minting. He collected hundreds of monkeys at low prices in the earliest stage, and then became one of the most active promoters of Bored Ape worldwide.
He gave the monkey to celebrities such as Kai Ko and Jay Chou, which attracted the attention of celebrities to NFT. With Stephen Curry, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and others buying it, the price of BAYC has soared, becoming the most eye-catching and popular NFT asset in the world. Maji has also become the hottest NFT boss in the circle, and is even called the godfather of NFT.
I remember that when Jay Chou's monkey was stolen, many authoritative financial media in China reported it. Huang Licheng, who gave the monkey to Jay Chou, also reported it. After all, Jay Chou's monkey was worth more than 3 million at that time.
Blur Trap
But the Blur Ape was both his success and his failure. The large number of Blur Ape that Maji held made him lose a lot of money in the Blur mining trap.
In order to get the Blur token airdrop, Maji always ranks at the top of the Blur trading scoreboard. He is often the one who provides the most liquidity for monkey-related NFTs. He made millions of dollars from the first season of Blur airdrop. But when the second season airdrop was launched, the early big holders of BAYC in February 2023 began to sell, and in a very short period of time, 71 BAYC were sold to Maji at a high price.
This is just the beginning. In order to increase his score, Maji received a large number of NFTs. Since the second season of Blur airdrop, Maji's book loss has reached 5,000 ETH. By November 2023, his losses from NFT trading had reached 12,563 ETH, with a total value of 25.12 million US dollars. In July 2024, Maji sold all the Blur tokens he had obtained, with a loss of 3.16 million, and the grudge with Blur came to an end.
FriendTech Stud Goes to Zero
In September 2023, Friend.tech, the top Web3 SocialFi platform, set off a social mining storm. After more than a month of establishment, it set a record of daily revenue exceeding Ethereum. It was extremely popular and had countless imitations. The first three months were the most glorious period for Friend.Tech. After October 2023, Friend.Tech began to decline.
The second relative high point was in May 2024. At that time, Friend.Tech launched the V2 version and issued the platform currency FRIEND, which can be redeemed for points on the platform. At the same time, the project also announced that in addition to the 100 million points initially established, 12 million FRIEND incentives will be allocated to LP providers in the next 12 months.
Perhaps it was the generous rewards provided by Friend to LP that attracted Brother Maji, who not only bought a lot of Friend tokens, but also became the largest LP. And this may have become the biggest mistake.
Although the launch of V2 and the token airdrop brought some users to the platform, these so-called "innovations" did not save Friend.Tech from its decline. The protocol fees began to stagnate soon after. According to data from The Block, V2 has only generated about $60,000 in protocol fees since June 2024. As of yesterday, the project was completely ruined, and the value of all Friend tokens owned by Maji Da Ge was basically zero, after all, they could not be sold. The paper loss alone exceeded $15 million.
Does Maji still have money now?
From Arkham, we can see the changes in the funds in Machibigbrother’s account. Currently, the machibigbrother.eth wallet still holds more than 8 million assets, of which 7.6 million are on the Blast chain. The value of $BLAST tokens alone has reached 4.7 million US dollars.
Since the end of July, he has been continuously transferring assets to exchanges such as Binance to cash out, and at one point reduced the assets in his wallet from $44 million to $4.5 million, which can basically be considered a clearance sale. The operation of transferring ETH to Binance lasted until 4 days ago.
But what’s interesting is that he was still bullish on ETH yesterday and the day before yesterday. Could it be that he transferred to Binance to go long on the coin standard? (Laughs)
So do you think he still has money? I believe he definitely has money, and he is still richer than most people in the industry. But he must have lost a lot in the past two years, which is also more than most people in the industry.
Final Thoughts
Actually, I personally have mixed feelings about Maji. His life is definitely colorful and beyond most of his peers. He is over 50 years old, but he is still making memes with us. Can you believe it?
His beginnings in the cryptocurrency industry are undoubtedly tainted/suspicious, and some of his methods are really ugly. But to be honest, how many people who started out in the early days of the cryptocurrency industry have completely clean backgrounds?
He is also a person who really invests a lot of money in the cryptocurrency circle, whether it is promoting the take-off of NFT, opening imitations in every hot spot in the cryptocurrency circle, actively participating in the mining of Blur and Blast, investing heavily in secondary investment in cryptocurrency, or even making a stupid move and going all-in on Friend.Tech. It can be seen that he really believes in some narratives in the cryptocurrency circle, and of course, he was eventually cut by these trusts.
Compared with some people who have been hiding in the shadows and reaping profits through the primary market in the past two cycles, he has been exposing his funds to the risks of the secondary market. He is a very active market participant, much closer to us retail investors. From this perspective, I think he has a positive impact on the prosperity of the industry.
Many of the once-glorious OGs have quietly left in this cycle. If he really stops playing because of the losses of blur, bayc and friend, then the cryptocurrency world may really lose a lot of fun.
