I have been looking in to Crankk, the supposed IoT Network for some months and have produced a list of queries for a matter of discussion:
Background & Historical
In Jan '22, “Crankk.io” was launched as a L2 Blockchain where participants could buy “nodes”. Whatever happened to that? Crankk.io - Give Smart Contracts Agency and Access to Web Data.
Given that the founder apparently is an IoT enthusiast and has a long career history in IoT, why would you start by building an L2 Blockchain service?
By May '22 this “L2 Blockchain” had mysteriously become the Crankk IoT Network, same website, different wording Crankk.io - A Proof-of-Coverage LoRaWAN Crypto Network
In the May '22 website archive above you will notice that they are selling “gateways”. The options being “1 hosted gateway” or “2 shipped gateways”. This means you had to spend nearly $1000 if you wanted to have hardware in hand. If that didn’t seem like a good deal then you could pay $499 for the “hosted” option. This seems like a fairly devious marketing ploy to avoid having to actually ship product. You will also note that the image used is that of a RAK V2 Gateway. The RRP of these gateways is $199.99 to $304.99 (at 2023 prices) so quite the markup. What happened to the profits accrued from these sales Gateway – RAKwireless Store
In June’22 there were 9 “miners” online Crankk.io - A Proof-of-Coverage LoRaWAN Crypto Network
They were offering 150 “Founders Edition” miners as a starting point.
By August '22 there were now 18 “miners” online and the supposed “150” cap had been removed
https://web.archive.org/web/20220807213501/https://crankk.io/
September '22 and a new website. Presumably paid for by the $37,500 in profits accrued on the basis that there are now 125 “miners” online. This is quite a jump in numbers given that in the preceeding 3 months only 18 miners were sold/onboarded, I wonder what happened here? (Clue, somebody joined the network).
https://web.archive.org/web/20220928183747/https://crankk.io/mining/
Also on this new website design there has been the removal of the company name “Alertjack inc”.this was in the footer of all the previous website iterations. Here is the link to Alertjack Inc on Opencorporates
https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/4630711
Here is a link to Alertjack based in Budapest, Hungary, same founder https://www.f6s.com/company/alertjack#about
Also registered to alertjack inc is this company Rocket Ships for Terrestrial Shipping where the owner “Peter” refers to himself and his team as a “small group of aerospace engineering students”. Odd terminology for somebody with a history in the IoT sector. Guess this venture didn’t “take off”. But trying to acquire investment when claiming to be an “aerospace engineering student” is pretty fraudulent.
For reference, here is the address for Crankk Inc, a virtual mailbox in Delaware, some 3000 miles from the Sacramento address of Alertjack inc.https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/6872501.
Also on the new website, the miner image has been switched from RAK to a generic image with the crankk logo edited on. This is presumably to disguise the fact that they had started to drop-ship Dusun Gateways (without modification) (RRP $121 for the indoor model, sold by crankk for $499 and RRP $247 for the outdoor gateway, sold by crankk for $599)
By September 2022 there are now 8 team members according to the website, not listed though, nor any bios but we can assume it is the “team” that I will refer to later
By December 1st 2022 there are now a whopping 357 “miners” online netting an impressive $107,000 profit. No sign of it being reinvested in to the project though, nor does it remain “on-chain”.
By year end, 406 miners online so a nice $14,700 profit on miner sales for the month. Whatever happened to that 150 cap for the beta founders…
Mid-February 2023, 491 miners online, a further $25,500 in profits that were taken off-chain
https://web.archive.org/web/20230101000000*/crankk.io
Mid-March 2023, 588 miners online, a further $29,100 in profits taken off-chain
That takes us to April 2023 whereby they seemingly stop selling the Dusun miners and their “Beta” (although is it a “beta” when you have already had 2 “Beta’s”) starts.
Fastminers and the Kadena Link
We all remember Fastminers.io (search for their name in the Vosk main forum) the now defunct Helium Hotspot reseller who towards the end of their existence were busy shilling KDA Miners (Yes the same KDA that Crankk is built on) well it seems they had an interesting role at the start of Crankk as an IoT Network (as opposed to the L2 Chain it started as). Ezel88, the owner and co-founder of Fastminers along with his business partner “ActionCEO” were some of the very first advocates of Crankk in their Discord. In fact both the official fastminers twitter @fastminers_io has been a regular retweeter of Crankk’s tweets. ActionCEO has been one of the biggest shiller’s of Crankk without declaring his vested interest in the project and in fact almost all “youtubers” shilling Crankk are affiliated with Fastminers- Tactical Investing and Nordic I am looking at you.
Friends in High Places
Like me you are probably wondering what caused a project with 18 miners online in August 2022 to jump to nearly 500 by year end, in a bear market, for a token with no redeemable value and for a project with no clearly defined path to ROI other than “if it fails you can always sell your Pi”. Well, according to our tracking of their network coverage map, it would appear that the vast majority of these new miners were centred around Eastern Europe. Could it be that this incredible increase in onboarding was down to the September '22 appointment of a COO with extensive ties to the Helium and general mining communities in Eastern Europe? If you would like to understand his character then please refer to his posts in the Geodnet (a proper project) discord from earlier this year.
Within their “partners” section here Partners – Crankk is a link to a company called “VPSBG” who are based in, you guessed it, Bulgaria.
Then there is NOWAK IT, another “partner”. They claim to be providing the “infrastructure” for Crankk but if they are such a specialist in this field why are they also doubling up as a reseller of mining hardware, including pre-flashed crankk to helium hotspots Imprint – AMPCHAMPMENT (and yes, ampchampment.com is listed on the “partners page” too).
What would be really really bizarre is if a team member of Crankk recently lived in Stuttgart too…
Finally, in the Crankk video by Tactical Investing (timestamp 14:43) he specifically references a $250 Crankk device called “Vermillion Bird” and where does he say that this device is from… you guessed it, Bulgaria. Link to the youtube transcript Earn $11/Day Mining Dual Mining Crankk/Helium IOT — Eightify
If it looks like a Ponzi
Let’s imagine for a moment that I pitched you a scheme that looked like this:
You pay to join, you recruit new members, you are paid rewards solely from the joining fees of new members. The more new joiners, the more you get paid. Oh and in some cases I will actually pay you to recruit new members.
What would you say to me? You would say something along the lines of “There’s more pyramids there than in Egypt”.
Well that is exactly the rewards methodology for Crankk. When they “release” new license availability, these new joiners must acquire Crankk tokens. The only place they can acquire them from is the “P2P” trading platform of Crankk. This is where token holders can list their Crankk tokens at any price they like. This model is an incentive driven model to encourage more layers of new joiners, each buying Crankk tokens from the joining layer before. Not only that, this is specifically set up to benefit the early adopters (Eastern European Beta) as they hold vastly more Crankk tokens due to the release schedule and as such can list at a lower price, thus attracting a greater dearth of buyers. Don’t be fooled, the capped license release schedules are designed to promote and inflate this methodology by creating FOMO demand.
Then there are the “ambassadors”. Getting paid to recruit new members in to a scheme whereby their recruitment directly affects your ability to earn a return from your “mining” hmmm better lawyer up boys, you can afford it though, right.
**The “tech” **
In this Announcement — Q1 2023. Dear Community, | by Alviso (Crankk.io) | Medium medium post it is claimed that “Alviso” “Developed and released the most important features that enabled a LoRaWAN Network participation based crypto network”. This is at best disingenuous, here is why:
The first iteration of Crankk as an IoT/LoRa Network (when they were selling RAK’s) was based on the TTN Packet Forwarder (Line 8 from this bin folder from their github https://github.com/alviso/PactAgent/blob/master/bin/gateway-config.sh).
They then migrated to the open source Chirpstack. Now, unless Alviso is actually Brocaar in disguise then there was no development or release work here. It should also be noted that with a little bit of work and a spare hour you too can create a Chirpstack Network Server and MQTT broker.
Finally the PACT-Agent, again, developed and designed by the Kadena Team, not Alviso.
Now what puzzles me the most about their “tech” is why they bundle it in to private binaries when it is just a derivation of pre-existing open source software. Not only is it awfully suss to ask people to install private packages connected to their home networks, it is also in breach of the license usage on the Github forks. I digress, here is the issue with using other people’s projects, you are solely reliant upon them maintaining the repositories and also in not changing the terms of the licenses to prevent commercial use.
dual mining
Crankk apparently offer a “dual mining” facility enabling hosts to run Helium operations alongside Crankk. The interesting part about this is that Crankk claimed that this service was provided by a “3rd party” . This 3rd party is named as https://mishocy.io/ (of course domain information is redacted) however the website has never updated beyond a random picture of a mouse. This author suggests that Crankk management have deliberately created a “3rd party” as they are fully aware that dual mining on the same Lora concentrator will break duty cycle/transmission laws around the world. I wonder who takes the fall for that if caught?
Show me the money
The current explorer shows 3361 devices online, including 141 consensus nodes. By my calculation that is a net positive cash in flow of around $625,000 for the past year. Where exactly is this money? What has it contributed to? Running 3,000 gateways on the “free to use” chirpstack NS requires some virtual machines sure, but beacon-only transmissions are hardly data intensive so let’s not push the narrative that there are massive infrastructure costs. Users pay their own KDA fees, Grafana highest tier is $299 per month. So what exactly is the $625k for, guys? Salaries? And where exactly is it on chain?