Mixin: OGs gather together, Xiaolai supports it, and fans work hard

On September 25, SlowMist MistTrack posted on social media that the Mixin Network cloud service provider database was attacked, involving an amount of about $200 million. The news broke out and caused heated discussions in the currency circle, mainly because the well-known KOL Li Xiaolai was one of the early investors of Mixin Network. In addition, Mixin Network is also a model of making a fortune in silence, and has long been ranked in the top ten of the DeFiLlama TVL rankings.

The news was later confirmed, and Mixin Kernel officially stated on X (original Twitter) that in the early morning of September 23, 2023, the Mixin Network cloud service provider database was hacked, resulting in the loss of some assets on the main network. At the same time, the team has contacted Google and SlowMist teams to assist in the investigation. After preliminary verification, the funds involved are approximately US$200 million. Mixin Network recharge and withdrawal services have been suspended. After discussion and consensus among all nodes, these services will be reopened once the vulnerability is confirmed and fixed.

At 1 pm on September 25, Feng Xiaodong responded in a live broadcast that the damaged assets were mainly Bitcoin core assets, and assets such as BOX and XIN were not seriously stolen. The specific attack situation cannot be disclosed. Regarding the stolen assets, the official said that at present, a maximum of 50% will be compensated, and the remaining part will be compensated in the form of bond tokens. In the future, the official will use profits to repurchase. In addition, Feng Xiaodong also said that Mixin will also launch a new system for user asset migration, but the assets that can be transferred are temporarily only half of the user's balance.

Friends' Entrepreneurship

It is understood that Mixin Network is an underlying blockchain cross-chain protocol that aims to provide users with a more convenient and secure full-currency wallet to protect the security of users' assets. It positions itself as a free and fast digital asset peer-to-peer transaction network.

According to Mixin Network's official website, its ICP filing entity is Feigeman (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. According to Tianyancha information, the company was established in 2014. The legal person of the company is Feng Xiaodong. The current shareholders are Feng Xiaodong (94%), Li Xiaolai (5%), and Tieling (1%). Previously, Luo Yonghao also held shares in the company . Feigeman's wholly-owned subsidiary is Fig Adventure (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., of which Li Xiaolai is also a shareholder. The company's public information shows that it is a company dedicated to providing seamless leading video services in the mobile Internet field.

According to an interview conducted by Lianchaguan with Li Lin, the chief scientist of the Mixin Network project, Feng Xiaodong dropped out of Shandong University's computer science program in 2009 and later joined Google Play, becoming an early developer of Android applications in China.

According to public information, Feng Xiaodong earned his first $1 million in his life through Android and SDK development when he was a student. In 2011, he was invited to join Yixia Technology, a leading mobile video technology service provider in China, as a technical partner.

According to Li Lin's interview, in December 2014, Feng Xiaodong left to start his own business and founded the Fig Adventure company, which made an App focusing on the overseas mobile game live broadcast market. In December 2014, Feng Xiaodong started his own business and founded the Fig Adventure company, which made an App focusing on the overseas mobile game live broadcast market and received joint investment from Li Xiaolai and his good friend Luo Yonghao.

Later, he started a business in the blockchain field. The blockchain team was established in November 2017 with less than 20 people. In December, Mixin Messenger was launched. At that time, the product had the functions of encrypted social networking and peer-to-peer transfer.

On Mixin's official website, the project claims that its mission is to provide convenience, security and privacy for digital assets and messages, and that the open source software it builds always puts security, privacy and decentralization first. But now, ironically, the project itself has been hacked, causing potential losses of $200 million.

In addition, Mixin Messenger's core support team is composed of senior engineers and business experts from well-known technology and financial industries such as Weibo, Cheetah, and Kingsoft. When Vitamio SDK was released, Ku6 authorized its use.

The team behind Mixin also includes veterans in the cryptocurrency circle such as Mint and Lao Mao, partner of Coin Capital.

However, in early August 2019, Mixin COO "Mint" announced her resignation from the position of Mixin Network COO for personal reasons. According to her Zhihu article, she had served as Mixin COO in June 2018.

Li Xiaolai, the “earliest investor”, has repeatedly supported

Li Xiaolai has previously supported this project in public many times. This is the first project that Li Xiaolai has returned to the cryptocurrency circle to support after he announced that he would no longer support cryptocurrency projects. Li Xiaolai obviously also regards Mixin as his home court.

He claimed that he was "one of the earliest investors" of Mixin. On Mixin Messenger, he created communities, gave lectures, and promoted his "blockchain ETF product" BOX to the audience. In August 2019, Li Xiaolai claimed on his WeChat official account that he had sold 2.8 million BOX. At first, BOX consisted of three tokens: BTC, EOS, and XIN, and XIN was issued by MixinNetwork.

On November 10, 2017, XIN started trading on BigONE, an exchange owned by Li Xiaolai, with an opening price of 917 yuan on the first day of listing. In January 2018, the price of XIN rose to 15,000 yuan, but currently, the price of XIN is only around 1,400 yuan.

At the end of 2019, Mixin Messenger launched a "sign in and get BTC" activity that was chased by a large number of users. Sign in and get Bitcoin, and sign in for a year to get 0.066 BTC. According to the rules, the longer the sign-in time, the more BTC you get. According to official data, you can get 6.6 BTC if you sign in for 10 years. According to the current currency price, the income in 10 years will exceed 300,000 yuan.

Soon after, Mixin Messger increased the check-in threshold, requiring users to add KYC certification, answer questions, invite users, and even purchase some designated products. Mixin's frequent changes to the check-in rules and continuous increase in the threshold aroused the dissatisfaction of some users, saying that "Mixin's so-called check-in activity is nothing but a scam."

Mixin is not only questioning the rule change, but also the 10-year expiration date is considered unrealistic. In November 2019, Li Xiaolai said on Weibo that Mixin has 60,000 daily active users. According to this data, if these people check in for 5 consecutive years, Mixin will have to provide 100,000 bitcoins, which is about 500 million yuan at the current price.

Jerry still remembers that answering questions at that time required staking assets. If you answered questions every day and checked in continuously, the weight of the dividend pie would become higher and higher, but this dividend project was stopped after one year of operation. In addition, this Q&A had some outrageous question settings, such as misleading users to answer wrong answers, such as "where is the safest place to store coins, the correct answer is Mixin wallet."

These marketing tactics are very "Li Xiaolai". A large number of Li Xiaolai's fans follow Li Xiaolai to make fixed investments on Mixin. Jerry told Golden Finance that for the BOX fund, Li Xiaolai opened a "BOX Fixed Investment Practice Group" on Mixin, with the goal of realizing asset appreciation through fixed investments in blockchain assets. Li Xiaolai gives live lectures in the group every day, and the course content covers topics such as blockchain assets, investment, growth, and life. He also joined Li Xiaolai's "Fixed Investment Life" paid group on Mixin, with an annual fee of 0.012 bitcoins . There are more than 7,000 fans in the group now , and these people will follow Li Xiaolai to make fixed investments in Box. In the first two years, he also followed Li Xiaolai in this group to make fixed investments in BOX, and his income doubled. However, the increases in Bitcoin and Ethereum during the same period were 20 times and 50 times respectively. Later, he discovered that the purpose of this paid group was actually to listen to the various courses offered by Li Xiaolai.

Jerry discovered something wrong with Mixin and Li Xiaolai in 2019, because Li Xiaolai did not participate in the governance of the platform, and the choice of investment target for the ETF Box was also a mistake, with many private goods, such as XIN.

Where did the missing money come from?

According to Deflama data, Mixin's TVL is $394 million, ranking 8th among all public chains, surpassing Baase and Solana. Moreover, Deflama only counted the TVL of 10 protocols.

The main TVL comes from Bwatch, which alone is as high as US$264 million.

Bwatch is the community of BOX, which is an open-source fixed-investment fund for digital asset investment, designed by Li Xiaolai. BOX receives investment injections from Bwatch . Jerry analyzed to Golden Finance that the money in Bwatch is all fans' money, and it has been hovering around this amount.

According to the Bwatch official website, the current BOX components are composed of 7 tokens, namely BTC, ETH, EOS, DOT, MOB, XIN, and UNI.

BTC accounts for 86.69%, which means that the value of Bitcoin in Bwatch reaches 228 million US dollars (264 million US dollars * 0.867) . According to SlowMist analysis, the amount involved in Mixin's case is about 200 million US dollars.

Each BOX contains 0.0001 BTC, 0.0001 ETH, 0.03 EOS, 0.005 DOT, 0.01 MOB, 0.0008 XIN, and 0.01 UNI. Li Xiaolai has opened two courses on Bwatch: Xiaolai Open Class and Fixed Investment Life (paid group, about 0.012 BTC).

BOX Token is a proof of interest for participating in BOX investment. It is an ERC20 Token with a contract address of 0x045414e728067ab3da4bceafc0d992d59183463a. After BOX Token is issued, all of it will be transferred to Mixin Network.

The rights and interests of BOX follow BOX Token. Only when BOX is stored in Mixin Network (Mixin Messegner or other services in the Mixin ecosystem) and not withdrawn to the Ethereum main chain will there be rights and interests .

Mixin has its own unique ecosystem. According to Mixin’s official website, there are 47 Dapps on Mixin Network.

These Dapps include DeFi (Pando), exchanges (4swap, ExinOne, ExinSwap, Ocean One), Staking (ExinPool), wallets (MVG Bridge, Mixin Messenger, Mixin Wallet), robots (Mixin Bot, Trading Bot,), social (Rum Weibo Square), tools (Ahr999 Index, Mixchat, Mixin Data) and other applications.

At 1 pm on September 25, Feng Xiaodong responded in a live broadcast that the damaged assets were mainly Bitcoin core assets, and assets such as BOX and XIN were not seriously stolen. The specific attack situation cannot be disclosed. Regarding the stolen assets, the official said that at present, a maximum of 50% will be compensated, and the remaining part will be compensated in the form of bond tokens. In the future, the official will use profits to repurchase. In addition, Feng Xiaodong also said that Mixin will also launch a new system for user asset migration, but the assets that can be transferred are temporarily only half of the user's balance.

Seeing Feng Xiaodong's response, Jerry recalled an old story: Mixin has a wealth management section. Previously, Mixin moved users' assets to Fcoin for high interest rates. But later, Fcoin went bankrupt, and the compensation received by wealth management users was also bonds.