Substratum’s Dark Side of the Moon

Substratum is a project aiming to power the decentralized web by allowing free and equal internet access to users around the globe. The project promises to allow anyone to host a node and receive Substrate in return for contributing to the network. Currently the product is in closed-beta allowing only a select few participants, supposedly under an NDA, to test out the network.

Substratum’s price rose from $0.30 to over $2.50 in the last month alone, heading straight to the moon. However, due to some new information recently released, we must look at Substratum’s dark side of the moon.

Substratum CEO’s background

The first piece of news that surfaced about the Substratum project is that Justin Tabb, Substratum’s CEO, has a questionable background. According to Polk county Sherrif’s public records, Justin Christopher Tabb was arrested in 2001 on multiple charges ranging from Burglary W/Assault and Battery to Probation Violation. We reached out to Justin for comment.

While the CEO being an ex Felon is by no means a positive influence on the project, it is something that can be looked past. After all, the charges were filed 17 years ago and people make mistakes.

Datadash Drama

Many of you may have heard about Substratum from Datadash’s youtube channel. Datadash is the largest crypto youtube channel with over 200k subscribers. The channel promotes all types of ICOs and tokens and gives insight into developing projects.

In a series of videos, Datadash promoted the Substratum ICO and advised about it’s potential. However, it recently came to light that Datadash has been compensated for his efforts by the Substratum team. While that in itself isn’t unethical, what is a problem is not disclosing the sponsorship to your viewers.

Datadash also posted a youtube video explaining exactly what happened. I do believe the video was a smart decision by Datadash to come clean to his viewers, but I honestly do not believe the story about him moving the Ethereum address to different harddrives and somehow “losing” access to 100k SUB.

The Merkle also ran a story about the Substratum ICO back in August, but since we were paid for it, we included a disclaimer like we do with any sponsorsed post. It is both unethical and a violation of FCC regulations to promote projects for payment without a proper disclosure. In fact, it is not even the promoter that usually gets in trouble, but the company paying for the promotion – in this case SUB.

Overall Substratum has an amazing vision with a promising project, however until a working product is presented nothing is certain.