PulseChain is an obvious scam
Ugh PulseChain...
I've been recently engaged in a minor social media back and forth with some PulseChain advocates (let's call them by their real name: scammers) over the launch of this "project".
Where to start trying to educate these people?
And more importantly educate the rest of the people reading their stuff?
How about the project home page! https://pulsechain.com/
One Unsubstantiated Claim After Another
Wild claims abound with zero to back them up. Which legit projects include stuff like this?
These are both just great.
How? This isn't a rollup. Or a side chain. https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/. It's first class drivel.
This is a beauty. It's probably my favourite (though it's so hard to pick!).
For anyone completely out of the loop, Ethereum transitioned to POS over a year ago. It was the nicknamed The Merge, it was all over the news. Better yet the Beacon chain, the POS Ethereum launched in preparation for the eventual full switch over went live a year before that!
So this website is at least a year out of date, and there wasn't much on the website to start with. Just crazy.
There are a bunch of technical sounding claims. Like this.
That's a big claim. You'd think that would be in the docs right? Along with detailed descriptions of architecture (for this revolutionary blockchain) right? At very least you'd think the block rewards would be in there. Seeing as they're 25% less than Ethereum's right?
Docs: https://gitlab.com/pulsechaincom/pulsechain-mainnet
The "docs" are an expanded readme at best. It's just a bunch of instructions for interacting with PulseChain via an API rather than through the the webpage. Basically just more: Quick buy PLS NOW!
The validator site least has more words: https://launchpad.pulsechain.com/en/faq
But even that is mostly gibberish. The main aim seems to be to get people buy and deposit 32M PLS. They just keep on mentioning that. But still nothing about those block rewards...
There's nothing in either of those docs to back up any of the claims being made.
Remembering this is all supposed to be hooked up to a functioning chain, check out this.
https://launchpad.pulsechain.com/en/ says there's a lot of PLS staked. Makes sense, there's a lot of validators and you need to stake PLS to validate.
But head over to https://beacon.pulsechain.com/ and, shockingly (or maybe not so shockingly), there's actually 0 PLS staked.
This is the problem with conducting this elaborate scams, you need to keep so many plates spinning it may just be easier to actually do the thing rather than pretending to do it.
It Looks Like DeFi....
First rule of scamming: Fake it till you take it (people's money that is).
They've got something that looks like a DEX https://app.pulsex.com/swap. You can swap into PLSX, a token that looks like a liquid staked PLS, but I have no idea what it is.
And while we're on this: Why is PLSX worth less than PLS? That's not how liquid staked tokens normally work. Either it's some form of yielding token that increases in value or it's a one for one swap.
This just seems to be another random token.
Check out those yields! https://app.pulsex.com/farms
You earn your swap fees in yet another token, INC, but there's zero documentation to be found anywhere about that.
It's clear they've slapped this together really quickly as there is all these mistakes they've made.
Probably the weirdest feature is the burn feature. You can select LPs to buy and burn PLSX Which is what? Liquid staked PLS? For what purpose? Nothing is explained.
You would think these LPs are from the Farms page, but I can't find any of them on the Farms page. What are they? Who knows. No explanation.
The tokens page, despite being under Info, https://app.pulsex.com/info/tokens, offers more questions than information (like all of this).
Why is PLS, the main token of the PulseChain not in here? But a wrapped version, WPLS, here? Why even have a wrapped PLS token for that matter?
The reason wrapped ETH (WETH) exists is because the original ETH token didn't have the full functionality the developer of Ethereum needed to fully realise the potential of smart contracts so they create the first token standard on Ethereum, ERC-20, and when you put ETH inside that (becoming WETH) it dramatically increased in functionality.
But that was back when that the Ethereum team was inventing stuff as they went along. PulseChain is a new chain. It shouldn't need to upgrade it's token before it's launched.
Yet another mistake the scammers here have made trying to pass this off as legit.
Tokens Be Broken
Clicking on the tokens is hilarious. Our favourite yield token, INC (cleverly named Incentive, see what they did there?) has a 24hr volume of just over $72B (!!).
https://app.pulsex.com/info/token/0x2fa878ab3f87cc1c9737fc071108f904c0b0c95d
Poor old Solana (SOL) can only manage a bit over $226M.
Someone better let Anatoly know there's a new game in town. Break it to him gently please.
But here, yet again, we can do some basic due diligence to assess risk.
Go to a coin explorer (CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko) and try and find these tokens.
You can't find them.
Even PLS itself, the token that underlies the entire (multi billion dollar!) network is sketchy.
It's not on CoinMarketCap and the CoinGecko listing is sparse https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pulsechain to say the least.
That's not good as, according to PulseChain, they have the data feeds all up and running, which is what CoinGecko is using.
https://scan.pulsechain.com/
https://beacon.pulsechain.com/
At least the price is somewhat similar. Which means there are working feeds. So why isn't full data available on CoinGecko?
Even more interestingly, PLSX (which still we don't know what that is) has a full listing on both coin explorers.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/pulsex
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/pulsex/
So why doesn't the native token itself, which is running the entire PulseChain, have a full listing?
The more you dig, the stranger it gets.
Real Projects Look Like This
If you're not familiar with tech or the technology under pinning blockchains here are what legitimate projects look like.
If you're running a blockchain you need a lot of documentation. It's a complex task after all, especially maintaining a decentralised validator set.
https://docs.sei.io/
https://docs.canto.io/
Even dapps, which are apps sitting atop a blockchain, have extensive docs
https://docs.beefy.finance/
https://docs.frakt.xyz/frakt/
And when you go to their dapps you should have a range of functionality
Decentralized Perpetual Exchange | GMX
Ref Finance
Badger DAO | Deposit & Earn on your Bitcoin
Even a meme coin project, whilst not a detailed as something like a blockchain or a dex, should have a meaningful amount of information for you to browse and links out to working products/integrations. BONK is a great example of something that isn't serious in the way Curve Finance is, but there is clearly a serious amount of work that's been done here https://www.bonkcoin.com/about
Scam Till You Drop
The beautiful thing is PulseChain proves themselves a scam with their own docs and protocol web portals.
The NFT rug pull scammers have the right idea. Less is more. Post up a Twitter account, a splash page and 10K randomly generated JPEGs. Less you say the less chance you have of giving the game away.
PulseChain is so bad they can't even do scamming well.
A Pedigree No One Wants
I wonder how many of the PulseChain devotees also have lost money in HEX? Richard Heart, he of HEX scam fame (see Is HEX The Most Notorious Scam in The History of Cryptocurrencies?) is front and centre at PulseChain.
You can keep a good scammer down I suppose. They're like cockroaches.
Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.
Seriously. Avoid this like the plague.
DYOR
None of the above will guarantee you won't lose money to a failed or project.
- Terra Luna was a legit project with many participants and projects that still went to near zero https://thedefiant.io/what-was-luna
- The shareholders of First Republic Bank got wiped out https://www.investopedia.com/what-happened-to-first-republic-bank-7489214
However doing some basic investigation, like we've done here, will help you avoid the tidal wave of obvious scams that are out there.
It'll also likely provide you with a few LOLs. And who doesn't like some LOLs?
