After more than 11 years, it ... | Simon Yu OKX Feed

After more than 11 years, it breaks my heart to announce @stormxio is officially closing down.

StormX has rewarded more than 250 BTC, thousands of ETH, and millions of dollars in STMX, LTC, DAI, and Doge to millions of people across the globe.

Many people received their first crypto through us back when BTC was just a few hundred dollars and we helped opened the door to the world of blockchain and crypto.

I apologize for the lack of communication, but until the very end, even after the merger had fallen apart, we tried to put together other ways we could keep it going but it was too late, and ultimately was unable to do so.

I’d been extremely burned out, mentally drained, and had to just step away from everything for a bit. Startups are hard, and wow, I’d like to share the experience and the shit I went through and why most startups fail within the first two years.

I met my cofounder in 2015, and immediately became close friends, as we shared similar interests. I had a day job as an analyst for a bank and had risked my savings building a food business that finally started picking up.

For the first time I was starting to do well financially but this wasn’t my passion. I was obsessed with Bitcoin and Blockchain from a research paper I wrote back in college.

Everyone I knew called it a tulip bubble and would laugh anytime the word Bitcoin came up. He was the only one I had met who felt that passion with Bitcoin and blockchain and we would geek out about all the endless possibilities out there.

He had built a simple app that rewarded users $0.002 in Bitcoin for watching an ad. It seemed silly wasting time to earn less than a penny but surprisingly there were thousands of users a day using the product.

It came to me that this was only possible because it was being sent using crypto instead of fiat. With fiat it’d be too expensive and impossible as wire transfer and foreign transaction fees would outweigh the amount being sent.

We saw a huge opportunity and knew we could tap into a global market because of this advantage. We continued to work on the product and wanted to increase the amount people can earn.

We started growing fast, our server costs were increasing, and all of a sudden Bitcoin price which had been flatlining around $400 for a while climbed to $1,000.

Bitcoin transaction fees suddenly became congested, expensive, and the BTC transaction cost would cost more than any profit we were making.

Ok shit.. are we fucked..? We were running dangerously low on cash or we’d be bankrupt soon. We stayed up all night and brainstormed all different things we could possibly due to ensure we could stay up.

After all the different ideas we came up with a plan. We’d pivot to Ethereum. ETH at that time was only $10 and could process much more transactions than Bitcoin could.

Within just a few days my co-founder had finished making the changes and we were able to solve our problems and continue rewarding to Ethereum to users.

We were growing fast and we had gotten into a small accelerator and just enough to pay ourselves $1500/month to pay ourselves for the first time and quit our other jobs.

After the program ended, our users and revenue were still growing but in Seattle a consumer based Bitcoin company was not the risk appetite anyone was looking for.

We had insane server costs and again we were at a point where we had limited runway left. On LinkedIn I saw there was a Bitcoin startup pitch competition happening in Vegas in the next few days.

With the last few dollars we had we pulled a hail Mary and I bought a ticket for the event, plane ticket, and the cheapest hotel room in Vegas at the Flamingo.

There was no prize money but I ended up winning the competition. Even though there was no prize it caught the attention of several investors and we were able to raise our first pre-seed and eventually a seed round.

Now in 2017, crypto started to go through the roof. Ethereum jumped to $400, transaction fees increased, and all of a sudden congestion had caused us to have the same issue again as we did with Bitcoin.

Fuck.. We were going to run out of money again less than a year at the rate we were growing. Companies started launching their own tokens and for us it made sense as we could significantly the reduce the transaction cost by building a L1.5 of ETH.

We didn’t know how to launch a token or do a crowdsale and a close contact of ours introduced us to a “Crowdsale Advisory Firm”. It was going to be expensive but the guy in charge saw the same vision of what this could be and was extremely connected in the space.

Hype started building quickly as we were one of the only companies that had a working product with users, revenue, and an actual need for why we need a token. We had investors all across the world that wanted in. We were able to raise millions.

Then strange things started happening. The advisory firm were collecting funds on our behalf but would not share where the funds were being held nor share how much exactly the amounts were.

Every time we would ask he would dodge the question and talk about how he was able to pull a big win for us. We were too busy building the company and we didn’t think too much of it.

As the time for our token launch came near, regulatory uncertainty and tech challenges were delaying our launch. The hype started to die down as the crypto excitement was lessening.

D-day was drawing near and at this point we really needed the funds as we wouldn’t be able to pay any staff or costs within the company and told him we needed the funds deposited now.

After stalling as long as he could, he started getting angry now and go off on how much he’s done for the company and gave us a new agreement that we had to sign which demanded more than half of our funds raised (significantly more than what we agreed upon).

We consulted with our lawyers and the lawyers told us we had no choice because he would just hire lawyers to drag out the process until we were bankrupt (we later found out the partner at the firm we were working with was his plant he had inside).

We had no choice, we took what we could and focused on building the future. We scaled quickly and built a large team and office ready to take over the world. We quickly became a company worth several hundred million dollars and reaching a $1B+ for one quick day.

Within just months crypto started crashing hard.. the hype was over. The token fell more than 90%. The pitchforks and hate started to pile in nonstop. Users and revenue fell off a sharp cliff with crypto being labeled as toxic again.

The advisory firm started extorting us which eventually led them to start to bury us in legal expenses. The messed up thing about the US legal system is you can steal money, and buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever but if you steal enough, hire the best lawyers, you get away.

I was getting overwhelmed and one of our senior executives had been with us for a while suggested I take a vacation as I had been working around the clock for years and was starting to get burnt out.

While I left, I get a call from our team saying that executive is planning to throw my co-founder and me out of the company and was harassing our staff. When I came back shit was on fire much worse than I left. We let that person go, who then proceeded to sue us.

Upon discovery we started digging in and learned it was even worse than anything we imagined and she was planning to steal everything from the start.

Crypto was dead, our product barely had users, we had a team that was on fire, burn rate high, and an insane guy who would use his unlimited resources to continue to bury us.

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