Original author: shushu
On January 31, Argentine President Milei posted a tweet on his X account, writing: “He is providing me with advice on the impact and application of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in the country,” and attached a photo with a young man in a suit and gold-rimmed glasses.
This person is Hayden Mark Davis, a key figure in the LIBRA token issuance controversy.
Who is Hayden Mark Davis?
Hayden Mark Davis LinkedIn profile shows that he has been the CEO of Kelsier since October 2020, the founder of Luxury Drip, a company in an unspecified industry (although there is an Italian brand of the same name, in the urban fashion sector), and, according to Davis, an entrepreneur since August 2017, a company called Leaders Elevate. If you search for the latter company on Google, one of the results points to a company focused on coaching, founded by another person named Tom Davis, who lives in Barcelona.
Hayden Mark Davis personal account still cannot reveal his story. The last photo was uploaded by Javier Mile from the presidential palace, and another one dates back to February 2022. In the photo, the young man took a photo with several other people named Davis and tagged their names. Thomas Davis and Gideon Davis appear as CEO and co-founder of Kelsier respectively. This account has been locked and made private.
Kelsier Ventures deleted team members found based on web snapshot
How Kelsier Ventures works
The following content is from an investigative video by BoDoggos Entertainment CEO and journalist Nick ONeil:
In this video, I want to take a deep dive into Kelsier Ventures, which is still actively providing token issuance services to date, even though one of their founders, Hayden, is currently at risk and involved in an international scandal. What I can learn today is the entire process of how Kelsier conducts token issuance, including fees, how the company is involved in money laundering, token laundering, and internal manipulation for friends and relatives. Next, I will switch to the computer screen to show my understanding of Kelsier Ventures and how they currently operate, and gradually break down the four important components of Kelsier Ventures.
Shipping
I interacted with the team members and learned about their actual charges and operation process. First of all, Kelsier Ventures is still actively operating. Hayden is currently in an undisclosed location. Although I know roughly where he is, I don’t want to make this information public.
I received a quote from the team today and their core business model is clearly still to keep their heads down and you will immediately see what I call a fire and drain process designed to extract as much money as possible from their tokens. When you pay for their services, they discuss how to shuffle and target sniping. I will go into the fee structure in a moment, but essentially they want this whole process to be untraceable and to launder money in and out.
Some people might call it wire fraud, I dont know how they would define it, Ill leave it to the judicial system to judge, but from my perspective, it basically is.
They also make markets after the tokens are issued and offer different options. These include short-term operations, the most well-known of which is Melania, and long-term market making, which requires them to use 20% of the tokens for market making. The shuffling process that I mentioned earlier is done in these operations, and then funds are withdrawn from them.
Fees
Next, lets look at pricing. Pricing is pretty standard. If youve dealt with market makers in this space, you know its pretty straightforward. They take 2% of the tokens and plan to sell them off in the future.
I saw a recent leaked internal video mentioning that it might be 1%. In fact, they might distribute the 2% to different people, but in any case, they are taking the 2% token share and plan to liquidate a maximum of 1.1% of it every day. That is, if you provide 2% of the tokens and the service period is 20 days.
So thats a $3,000 per day service fee, or 20% of the amount you withdraw. If you ask them to sell $1 million today, theyll charge 20% of that, which is $200,000. So the fee structure is based on the higher amount.
However, there is also a section on the cost of launching these operations, and this is the chart that they use internally and provide to their customers, and this is the latest pricing today.
Im not going to go into it here because its not important, but Ill give you an example. Lets say you want to set the market cap of your token to $1 million, and you plan to do a 94% token shuffle. They typically do this shuffle with every issuance, usually between 85% and 97%. If you look at the Melania token issuance, it fits right in that range. In this way, theyre actually getting in before the market officially opens, basically front-running all the other buyers.
Using the million dollar market value as an example, lets say it costs you 333.33 Sol today to start the process, thats 333.33 times $180, a total of $60,000, plus 20 Sol as the initial cost, plus other expenses, the final cost is $63,500.
Why would you choose a higher market price? That could be because there is a lot of demand and you want to start at a high price. Of course, for some small projects, the market price is lower, but for larger projects like Trump Coin, Melania Coin, etc., the price will be higher and they will have a larger proportion of pre-shuffle.
From my perspective, this is almost illegal, but thats how they are structured. I suggest you look at this chart yourself to understand how they operate.
Finally, I want to mention a key point that I will further demonstrate in the video. According to my sources, 90% of the snipers are from within Kelshear. They hand out tokens to friends or set up operations for their own bots. While I cant confirm this, it seems that this is how they operate, which is ridiculous.
As I said, they are still doing this. The whole system is based on money laundering, front-running, market making, short term classic “pump and dump” (like the Melania token), and then long term market making, which was also mentioned in the conversation between Hayden and Dave Portnoy, where they will eventually use the money they make to buy back the tokens and eventually “dump” them on the market.
