Many MMA fans were saddened to hear about Khabib Nurmagomedov’s decision to take a step back from MMA in order to spend more time with his family. But apparently, Nurmagomedov has been busy posting about his new business venture daily.
He’s been shouting out his collaboration with GMT token.
We first spotted Nurmagomedov in a GMT shirt in 2021 but weren’t familiar specifics at the time.
#GMTtoken #token #bitcoin #khabib pic.twitter.com/uQyXHYpapG
— GoMining (@GoMining_token) October 15, 2021
This endorsement is particularly interesting considering Nurmagomedov previously came out as a big opponent of sports betting due to the possibility of it ‘ruining your life’.
So what is GMT token?
GMT token was created by GoMining. The idea behind the token is to have each GMT backed by “constantly growing computing power”, and each GMT is meant to allow holders to mine bitcoin for an unlimited period of time.
Why is GMT token a Ponzi?
GMT tokens are meant to be staked via smart contract. There two staking options, fixed and flexible and if you choose fixed and lock up your tokens for 3 months – you’re promised a 20% return (Annual Percentage Rate).
20% return is promised to those who agree to receive staking rewards in GMT Token whereas staking for bitcoin returns offers varying returns.
If, by owning GMT we own computing power, wouldn’t the returns be dependent on amount of bitcoin mined rather than a fixed amount of made up coin?
In the world of investments, higher returns usually come with higher risk. A return of 20% or more is considered very high, and it’s unlikely to be sustainable in the long run. Legitimate investments usually offer more realistic returns that are based on the performance of the underlying asset. For the sake of comparison we should point out that S&P 500 provides 11% average returns for the last 50 years and that’s considered a great investment.
Price of hardware and electricity are going up while Bitcoin’s value halved compared to this time last year. This alone should be enough to make you question guaranteed 20% returns. Not to mention that by owning the NFT you don’t actually own hardware just a picture of it that you can ‘upgrade’,
*There’s also a required minimum investment meaning that at today’s prices you’d have to invest at least $10.
In case you’re not scared already, the Terra Luna crypto scandal in 2022 is a great example of an ecosystem that was promising 20% returns – until the value of the token went from $86 to $0,00016.
GMT token was based on the Solana network – so it was greatly affected by the Terra Luna Collapse in April (as was Solana). The price has gone down since, but so has most of the crypto market.
GMT also launched an NFT collection in September. This collection allowed users to exchange GMT for NFTS “in the form of a miner,” powered by computing power that allows users to win BTC rewards.
And in case you’re not convinced yet – the project was an epic flop. As per opensea, total of 7 sales happened since.
Greedy Machines NFT had a floor price of 0.210 ETH or about $340 in today’s money.
Khabib x GMT NFT
Khabib’s collection with GMT token offers pretty much the same experience as the Greedy Machines flop – owning an NFT promises you’ll own a fragment of hardware Gomining already owns in some of their mines, which will then, in theory, mine for you.
The only Khabib type reward here is that the NFT can serve as a ticket to his private events. The homage to him is the fact that each of the NFTs equals to computing power of 29 TH/s.
Based on the specs for the project, a single NFT should earn $59 a month but this isn’t accounting for power spent mining. (look up in whitepaper).
But the fun doesn’t end there. There are daily rewards for 170 NFT holders who are ‘playing the NFT in solo mining mode’ – then their daily rewards will be multiplied by 29.There’s reason to believe there will be roughly 5000 nfts.
And the whole thing is tied into a clicker game (their words). The clicker game has 2 modes. Solo mining and Pool mining. Solo mining has fixed payouts every day, pool has dynamic incase of victory.
Clicker games are video games whose gameplay consists of the player performing simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly.
This “grinding” earns the player in-game currency which can be used to increase the rate of currency acquisition. In some games, even the clicking becomes unnecessary at some point, as the game plays itself, including in the player’s absence, hence the moniker idle game.
And GMT features one of these right now that’s remarkably annoying. you’re basically clicking on an animation of a working mining machine in each round. Even if you ‘upgrade’, you’re not actually getting anything.
Who is running GMT Token?
It’s pretty standard to evaluate a crypto currency based on who is working on the taem. While there was a public CEO at GMT Token, that CEO departed in December of 2022 and no public successor has been announced.
Facebook pages for GMT Token are run out of Russia – and it’s very hard to tell how far Gomining’s bitcoin farms are from the actual GMT Token considering there are no tangible values except loose verbiage.
Khabib gets called out
Nurmagomedov was also called out for taking part in this venture by a notorious internet detective that previously deconstructed Floyd Mayweather NFT grifts in addition to pranking Dillon Danis into revealing his social media shout out fees for sketchy crypto projects.
When all is said and done, this can’t be good business for Nurmagomedov who was rumored as the owner of the biggest UFC contract to date – bigger even than Conor McGregor’s thanks to the part he played in putting together UFC’s Abu Dhabi venture during the pandemic.
Are we being too harsh?
While Nurmagomedov is likely not technically literate when it comes to blockchain technology it’s safe to assume he has expirence in the space. Previously Nurmagomedov was one of the high profile figures attached to metaverse boxing project called Legionfarm.
Legionfarm was an NFT collection that promised the opportunity to game against Sports and Egaming stars. They put on a twitch event in which Nurmagomedov had a vr boxing match against Max Holloway. Islam Makhachev and Daniel Cormier served as commentary on the project.
The opensea link dedicated to the collection paints a damning story.
But there’s also another project that’s a bit more conclusively fraudulent. Roughly 2 years ago Khabib Nurmagomedov released an NFT project titled Khabib Nurmagomedov NFT Gold cards.
Project sold 455 ETH worth, totaling roughly $800,000 in today’s money and likely much much more if it was sold back in May of 2021, when the majority of the NFT sales took place.
ETH was close to $2000 in the end of May of 2021. It’s now in the $1.6k range.