Current VIVA Situation - Next Steps

in #viva7 years ago

To the VIVA and TradeQwik community:

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY - THERE IS A LOT OF INFORMATION IN THIS REPORT

It is obvious that the hope and expectations we all have in VIVA have not yet been met by any stretch of the imagination. This reality has caused a slew of rumors and accusations to fly. However, in situations like this, opinions, rumors and accusations do not help.

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We need answers, we need truth, and we need to know where our money is.

So, straight to the point.

Meredith Loughran, Sherry Dunham and myself have been asked to roll up our sleeves to attempt to get the answers (and money) that we all deserve.

Sherry has an Accounting degree with over 20 years experience in the field. Her dedication to the VIVA project has been proven since she joined it over a year ago.

Meredith is a social media and community advocate, as well as an active VIVA and Steemit member. Many of you have come to know her as a voice of reason and fair counsel for the health of the communities she serves.

Most of you know me as the VIVA Storyteller. I have extensive business experience and have successfully led technical teams for many years.

Our Goals

Here are our primary objectives in this process:

  1. Run the numbers and obtain answers to the hard questions we all have.
  2. Request and then secure any and all assets.
  3. Communicate our findings with complete transparency via email, Basecamp, Steemit and the forum.

The founders, Dawn, Alec, and Steve have significant personal financial stakes invested in this project, as do Joe and Rick, who partnered with Steve in TradeQwik. Craig, the acting CEO of VIVA for several weeks also has invested a considerable amount into this project.

All of them have a vested interest in seeing VIVA and TradeQwik survive and thrive through these difficult times.

Let's not forget you, the VIVA and TradeQwik community, who have invested your time, money, and faith in the project.

We all deserve better.

Here is a list of exactly what we propose to do:

  1. Dennis will be the leader of this effort and will have ZERO access to any funds.
  2. Sherry and Meredith will act as custodians for all funds and other assets. Funds will not be released for any reason without a consensus approval between the three of us. Additionally, ledgers of these accounts will be published on a regular basis, to ensure transparency and honesty.
  3. Steve has agreed to answer all questions and make himself available to us and the community.
  4. A request will be presented to Joe and Rick to transfer exclusive access of all VIVA and TQ funds to Sherry and Meredith until our audit is complete. To ensure transparency, all funds recovered and held by us will be accounted for and published with weekly updates. Crypto tokens will be searchable on their respective block explorers.
  5. A request will be presented to Alec for the paperwork with regards to Galaxy Vault.
  6. A request will be presented to Alec to account for the VIVA ICO funds which he had possession of and managed.
  7. A request will be presented to Dawn to account for any VIVA funds which were in her possession and managed.
  8. A request will be presented to Steve to account for any VIVA funds which were in his possession and managed.
  9. A request will be presented to Joe and Rick to account for any TQ funds which were in their possession and mananged.
  10. We will build a database that will allow people to check their stated and audited balances by using their VIVA IDs. No names or emails will be published publicly. This database will include all transactions occurred up until the 4th of January.
  11. We will audit all Tradeqwik accounts. We have identified an initial number of 1257 accounts.
  12. Our discoveries and accomplishments through this process will be posted weekly through our official channels: email, Basecamp, and Steemit. Links will be provided on Facebook and Twitter in order to reach the broadest audience.


• • •

PLEASE NOTE: Though we have requested the recuperation of funds and information regarding funds, we cannot force anyone to comply, nor will any of the three of us. This is not within our power, nor the scope of this audit. We can only hope that all concerned parties will collaborate. Rest assured that we will openly disclose any lack of cooperation.

• • •


Here are some of the questions we plan on answering (not necessarily in this order):

  1. How much money has been and can be recovered?
  2. Were company (and/or) customer funds (combined with) personal funds?
  3. Who were receiving salaries, how much were they, and how were they paid?
  4. What were VIVA's legitimate business expenses?
  5. What were TradeQwik's legitimate business expenses?
  6. Were customer funds mismanaged?
  7. Were company funds mismanaged?
  8. Was there a bug that was causing Tradeqwik to lose money? If so, how much was lost and who benefitted?
  9. Did anyone erroneously take or receive funds?

Please understand that this is going to take time and effort, but we have already begun to make progress.

During this process we have decided to separate all accounts into 4 groups:

  1. PARTNERS - all those who have had, at some point in time, an equity stake in VIVA or TQ or considered themselves to have had one. This group includes Dawn, Steve, Alec, Joe, Rick, Dr. Padilla, Craig, Emmanuel. If we can identify direct family members of these people, they will also be included in this group.
  2. EMPLOYEES - everyone who has at some time received a salary from VIVA or TQ.
  3. CUSTOMERS - everyone else
  4. SPECIAL - test accounts, internal accounts, market bot, etc.

We have also decided to separate all assets on TradeQwik into the following groups:

  1. Gateway currencies (gVX) - BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, STEEM, SBD, GOLOS, USD, MXN
  2. Non-Gateway currencies (iVX) - All the BITCOIN, ETHEREUM....
  3. Viva Assets - VIVA, Crowns, TREASURYRIGHTS,...

Here is the data that we've been able to discover up till this point:

Total Number of Accounts by Type:

  1. PARTNERS - 9
  2. EMPLOYEES - 14
  3. CUSTOMERS - 1228
  4. SPECIAL - 6

As we review accounts some may be reclassified, but this is the initial data and gives you a pretty good idea of the scope of this endeavor.

Of the total CUSTOMER accounts here is how they break down by STATED balance in total gateway currencies:

Over $50K: 1
$10K to $50K: 3
$5K to $10K 4
$1K to $5K 14
$1 to $1K 737
less than $1 469

Please understand, these are the stated balances on Tradeqwik - they have not been audited yet (and may be slightly or grossly understated or overstated).

Here is how the total stated balances of gateway currencies break down by account type:

CUSTOMER 196,094.6717352558877600 USD
EMPLOYEE 48,401.4792901158107400 USD
PARTNER 765,817.7769339847429400 USD
SPECIAL 330,359.7383111150321800 USD

These amounts have been calculated using the last market prices in the database, so take them with a grain of salt, please.

This initial review leads us to feel optimistic in stating that when this whole mess blew up there were sufficient funds in TradeQwik and VIVA accounts to cover all customer funds.

We have also begun to put into place a clear process for auditing accounts. Fortunately, all trades are in the database and we now understand how to account for them. However, deposits and withdrawals in gateway currencies MUST be confirmed manually on the blockchain.

That will be our next effort in this process.

In this effort, as a team, we do not work for VIVA or TradeQwik or any of their respective owners. We are doing this for the community.

We believe that right now we need clarity before anything else can or should be discussed and we promise to let the numbers speak for themselves.

Hopefully, you agree.

Best Regards,

Dennis Lewis - [email protected] (@dennishlewis)
Sherry Dunham - [email protected] (@moondancer762)
Meredith Loughran - [email protected] (@merej99)

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It is my firm belief that Viva is a scam. It can't work, it won't work. There was never any coherent idea for how the Viva blockchain would work.

Even in a recent post, William/Steve admits there is no Viva blockchain (or at least he seems confused on the subject). Steve (@williambanks) is a master of spinning nice sounding techno-babble, but there is no code. He has not written any code and is unlikely to write any.

Why not just Viva Holding reporting bankruptsy to the authorities and the independent competition manager sorting it out ?

I imagine that's where it's headed, but of course it's not in Viva's interests to suggest that. I believe the whole operation was in Mexico, so I don't know what official recourse is available to non-Mexicans anyway.

I imagine that Viva community might want to proceed as 'community project', excluding people responcible for the disaster.
That looks to me like an usercase for some 'pocket-like' project.
Every Viva customer could be credited by 'pocket-Crowns', 'pocket-Viva', 'pocket-Vip' according to their balanses.
That makes all the data recorded in Steem blockchain ( so no one have to rely on Viva Holding servers) and allows redistribution via p2p trading.
Later on the snapshot of this 'pocket-viva-chain' could be used as genesis block for actual yet-to-be-developed 'viva-blockchain'.

What do you think about ?

I like the thought, and I could probably be convinced to help.

I have about $1000 of liquid crypto locked in TQ which probably could be withdrawn.
If it happens half of that amount I would be ready to direct towards funding this 'community project' and probably I'm not the only one who feel that way.
However I guess the new project can't start "tomorrow", people still be waiting for a miracle to come for some time.

Cool, let's stay in touch about it. If enough funds become available, I could potentially work up an interim Viva system as an extension to Pocket.

This would make sense if the interim Viva system needed some special functionality that we couldn't do with a Bitshares UIA or something like that.

Being involved in VIVA and bitshares I would be more than happy to assist with a potential bitshares UIA(s) to work out some potential solution if many of us agreed on something to further pursue.

It's cool to see this post... I'm still missing 80 Steem from an error in the withdrawal... But well, the only thing I can do... is to continue waiting...

Cool to see that at least you have plans to find out what happened

Something folks need to be aware of... the TQ database shows some very large discrepancies between what's in the balances table (which I believe is what the website uses to show your current balances) and the deposits and withdrawals tables. I'm talking differences of dozens, and in some cases, hundreds of BTC (which is the only currency I looked at).

It's entirely possible that there's a lot of records there that should be excluded. One possibility is a field called "customer confirmation"; excluding records where that is false produces a different set of numbers.

My hope is that performing actual audits on individual accounts will shed some light on why these discrepancies exist.

Hi @decibel - I apologize for taking this long to respond. I'm sure Sherry and Dennis would like to hear your recommendations and solve the mystery of any discrepancies. Has anyone reached out to you yet?

William/Steve always came across like one of those guys who thinks he's a near-genius, but never can quite get his ideas to work out. Glad I resisted the urge to participate.

Best case, he fooled himself into thinking Viva was something truly special, and ended up sweeping a bunch of people into his delusion.

Worst-case, he's just a scammer.

Thank you for sharing. Look forward to more details. Let me know if I may of any assistance.

@virtualgrowth - I sincerely apologize for the delayed response. I really haven't been in the public forums but please know that I appreciate you.

Why William is not refer at all?

William Banks is a pseudonym for Steve.

Thank you so much for doing this, all of you. I'm hoping that the situation is less bad than I thought. When the audit is done, we can reassess. Any further speculation is useless.

@kooshikoo - you are an angel. I am just as anxious to get the audits done and there is still much work ahead but out of this whole experience I can still say we have an awesome community. HUGS.

who is running audits on TQ accounts?

@looftee - Sherry, Dennis and I are working on a complete audit of VIVA Holdings and TradeQwik.

I have quite a bit of missing steem, 2052 to be exact and more in small transactions.

Can you tell me how long will it take to complete the audits?

Good luck to you @meredith and @sherry. I trust you.

Thank you @grandpere. That means a lot to me.