One of the ICOs that Ian Balina has repeatedly supported is Chromaway, and it has recently been identified as a ‘scandal.’ Known in the crypto world for starting slow and earning over four million through ICO investments, Ian Balina has risen as an advisor with a Twitter bio that reads “let’s make some magic internet money.”
Ian Balina has supported ChromaWay multiple times on social media and AMAs. During one his AMAs with New Spreadsheet Rankings in July, CryptoDiffer reported that he spoke about ChromaWay without revealing its name. “This one will be revealed soon. Unfortunately, this one will probably gonna be a private sale only. I will be investing in this one. I’m planning to advise them,” said Balina in the AMA session.
ChromaWay claims to be a blockchain technology company that is committed to developing and refining the industry’s technology. Set up in 2014, the company has been involved with both private and public blockchain endeavours. However, several allegations and doubts have been raised regarding the ICO. This began with a letter titled ‘Letter to the Community: Before you Invest in Chromaway. You Should Read This.’ This letter aimed to expose the corruption in the private group of Balina.
The letter points out that while the ChromaWay community has been promoting that “there are no unlocked rounds” of investment, there is direct evidence of an unlocked round of $2.5 million with the first allocation belonging to Ian Balina. “We know for a fact that Ian Balina has a 100% unlocked allocation as we are members of his Inner Private group that are bringing this to the attention to the community, our reasons will be disclosed later on. These tokens have already been re-sold and purchased by the inner circle, but we feel that another investment like this to hit the community will destroy the ICO investing space completely,” states the letter.
Since the letter, there have been several attempts by Or Perelman, co-founder and COO of ChromaWay to reach out to the community. According to him, the letter was just a FUD campaign. Further, on 26th August, Balina posted a series of tweets explaining that “Chromaway FUD is total BS.” He said that 100X advisor tokens in the project are locked with 40% up front and 1/6th every six months. “We’re not reselling anything or adding commission, despite what random anonymous telegram users may say,” he added.
However, as per recent developments, it turns out that the allegations in the letter were true. Ian Balina’s private pool has been exposed on Etherscan including the primablock address. It holds 7,000 ETH valued at $2 million, making it close to the figure of $2.5 million mentioned in the letter. This pool’s primablock has been shared publicly along with screenshots under the name ‘Chromaway presale- 100X.’
After this, over a thousand investors wanted to be a part of a discussion and explanatory session by the ChromaWay advisors. “Everyone here needs to stop this mental maserbation. Our tokens are locked, and yes we have a huge allocation because we will be working closely with the project. If you have any issues with any of that, you are free to take your interest elsewhere. No one is forcing anyone to participate in Chromaway,” shared Balina during the discussion.
After some explanations and controversial statements during the discussion, Perelman said that Balina was an advisor for ChromaWay and had access to a $2.5 million worth of unlocked funding. After this, Balina left the group without any comment about him pooling.
While there continues to be uncertainty regarding the current state of ChromaWay platform and the truth behind what the founders are saying, it is a critical lesson for the crypto community.
