The Reverse Demo Day we hosted, where VCs signed up to pitched founders, went really well yesterday. 

Over 175 founders tuned in to watch the VCs get their pitch on and by the end of the day, 150 new investor intros had been made. 

We’ll definitely host more of these in the future, so keep an eye out for calls to sign up. 

DAOS

Some hacker news

The person behind the infamous 2016 DAO hack may have officially been unmasked beyond a reasonable DAObt: all signs point to Toby Hoenisch, co-founder of failed crypto debit card company TenX, as the mastermind behind the heist, per a Forbes Report by Laura Shin released yesterday.

The backstory

Back when “DAOs to buy X” weren't cropping up every other day, The DAO was seen as a revolutionary example of the decentralized promise of Ethereum. The org had raised almost $140 million from members on the promise of becoming the first decentralized VC firm. Then disaster stuck:

• Just a few weeks after The DAO launched, a hacker picked its pockets to the tune of 3.64 million ETH, good for 31% of the total ETH held by The DAO. 

• To limit the damage, the Ethereum community made the controversial call to hard-fork the nascent blockchain into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Victims got their ETH back, but DAOs fell out of favor until their recent resurgence.

So how did Shin identify Toby Hoenisch as the likely culprit? In researching her new book, she unraveled the complicated path Hoensich allegedly took to hide his tracks:

• Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis noticed that the hacker had moved funds to a Wasabi Wallet, which combines transactions to make them anonymous.

• The breakthrough came when Chainalysis figured out how to de-mix transactions within Wasabi Wallet, something that had never been done before.

• In the end, the paper trail ended at Hoenisch.

After Shin sent him the evidence, Hoenisch maintained that he was not the hacker: “Your statement and conclusion is factually inaccurate,” read his curt reply.

Zoom out: Shin’s reporting comes on the heels of the DOJ’s seizure of $3.6 billion in stolen bitcoin from the Bitfinex hack. If Hoenisch turns out to be the party responsible, another of crypto’s biggest heists will have been solved in the span of a few weeks. At this rate, we’ll know who Satoshi is by March…

MARKETING

Brian Armstrong does his best Ryan Breslow impression

On Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote a seemingly innocuous Twitter thread describing how his company's viral QR-code Super Bowl ad came to be. Unfortunately, controversy ensued and the thread turned Armstong into the dreaded main character on tech Twitter for the day.   

The issue: Armstrong made it seem like the ad was developed in-house by Coinbase with no help from outside agencies. The tenth tweet in the thread literally reads, “No ad agency would have done this ad.”

• The only problem? That was kinda a lie. Martin Agency CEO Kristen Cavallo clapped back saying “Except an ad agency did do that ad,” because, as it turns out, multiple ad agencies were involved in the ad, including Martin Agency. 

• Armstrong eventually added an additional tweet that vaguely credited a “creative firm” without naming names…12 hours after posting the thread. 

Bottom line: Despite all the petty dunking and quote RT roasts, Coinbase still emerges from this scuffle as the real winner. Regardless of who came up with the ad, it worked. It drove 20 million site impressions within the first minute of airing and propelled Coinbase’s app to No. 2 in the Apple App Store.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: In 2012, the Japanese government heavily subsidized the construction of EV charging stations to incentivize adoption and meet demand for the coming EV boom. The only problem? The boom never came—10 years later, just 1% of vehicles in Japan are electric. 

Startup: Turns out you don't need a completely unhinged TikTok presence to build a successful language learning app. EWA, a language-learning app built around movies, TV, and books, has reached over 50 million downloads and raised $2.7 million in funding. More here.

Rabbit hole: A visual essay of what we’re searching for throughout the day, night, and in-between. (Google Trends)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Slack, Github, AWS, and Peloton all experienced major unexplained outages.

• Elon Musk continued his feud with the SEC, accusing the commission of leaking information about its investigation of him for securities fraud.

• Spotify made its aptly named Car Thing available to buy for $90.

• Tech stocks in China dropped sharply amid concerns about new regulations from the Chinese government.

• The European Union put together a team of cybersecurity experts to aid Ukraine in its standoff with Russia.

• AT&T shut down its 3G mobile network.

GAMES

We can’t decide whether Spotify’s decision to name its new product the “Car Thing” is brilliant or…not brilliant. But Spotify isn’t the first company to roll with a foolishly bold product idea.

Three of these horrible product concepts are real and one is fake. Can you spot the imposter?

1. Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling water

2. Colgate Kitchen Entrées

3. Cheetos Lip Balm

4. Lysol Chewing Gum

SOMEBODY BUILD THIS

Not sure what Jay needs an offshore entity for, but this is actually not a bad idea...

TID BITS

We spend a lot of time on Twitter, so you don’t have to. Here are the best threads and tweets you might have missed:

🐥 How a serial entrepreneur's reliance on Facebook cost him $100 million and 110 jobs. 

🐥 A playbook on how to build a legit Zapier competitor. 

🐥 Using flattery to close a fundraising round.

Bonus: Is being on Twitter net positive or net negative in the long run? The Hacker News community has some thoughts. 

TRIVIA ANSWER

Lysol Chewing Gum is the one we made up, but it's still a better idea than Cheetos Lip Balm.