Louverture: Undone From The Inside
Exposing Omega’s Lies, Greed, and Incompetence
On the evening of June 20th 2022 at approximately 9:30 PM UTC, it was announced that the Louverture Finance protocol was to be shut down. This abrupt announcement was made on Twitter by the protocol’s CEO and founder, Omega.
What at first appeared to be only a rash decision to abandon the project was soon revealed to be a complex premeditated months-long scam involving millions of dollars and innumerable lies.
The following article is the Louverture Community’s attempt to document these events, compile the evidence regarding all misdeeds and criminal behavior, and expose Omega, in the hopes that he will be brought to justice.
TLDR: After Louverture rugged, several members of the community set out to discover the truth of what happened and who was behind it. We uncovered a systematic pattern of theft, as well as critical details regarding Omega’s identity. Attempts were made to work out a resolution with Omega that involved a community-controlled redistribution of the treasury funds and possible takeover of the protocol by trusted community members, but these talks stalled. All relevant information has been passed onto the authorities.
Day of The Rug
In the wake of the Twitter announcement, it didn’t take long to realize something was amiss.
No formal discussion was had regarding this decision in the official Louverture team Slack. No one but Omega seemed to know this was coming, as the team was just as shocked as the community when the announcement was made.
Active members of the team and the community quickly scrambled within the Louverture Discord to make sense of what was going on, but there was no explanation other than that the protocol had been rugged.
Omega made several tweets defending his decision to close down the protocol, namely that it wasn’t profitable. Of course, the fact that no team member was notified and that no internal discussion was made, put this excuse to rest fairly quickly.
Yet, there was still some plausible deniability. After all, Louverture was still a fairly active protocol despite the depressing market conditions. In the weeks prior to the shut down, updates were being implemented and treasury investments were being made. There was no blatant reason to assume that anything malicious was going on.
However, the official Louverture and Omega Twitter deactivations pretty much sealed the deal. The official Louverture Telegram was also shut down.
These events occurred later that same evening, followed soon after by the deletion of the entire LVT Discord server. Claiming rewards was also intentionally disabled, despite the fact that Omega said the protocol would still be running until the 24th.
Confirmed rug.
With the community without a home and the official LVT communication channels dark, the situation appeared hopeless, just like any other rug.
The Investigation Begins
The Louverture community is nothing if not strong. We had been through plenty of ups and downs prior to this and despite concerns over price action and management, the community has always held fast.
Wanting to provide a haven for displaced LVT members, Partnerships Lead MrMohawk opened up his personal Discord server to the public that night. In only a few hours, the server was full of familiar faces, but there was an undercurrent of frustration. What action could be taken now that the rug was confirmed?
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This is when things took an interesting turn.
It wasn’t long before an investigation was underway to discover Omega’s identity, in hopes that doing so could bring about some form of resolution.
When anonymous individuals rug a protocol, there is usually very little anyone can do. While plenty of theories run rampant, these threads of information are often tenuous at best because they are based wholly or in part on speculation. And like most other rugs, there wasn’t much to go off of with Omega, who had never so much as made his voice known to the community, let alone his face.
Past suspicions of foul play would be the x-factor here, as there was already quite a bit of material to sift through in regards to Omega and his actions dating back to the very start of Louverture Finance. This material included Telegram screenshots featuring discussions with former team members, and an extensive Twitter archive going back over 2 years.
Unbelievably, it only took a few hours to uncover a few promising leads. Buried under years of tweets was mention of an eCommerce brand (Eidha.com), an OpenSea and Twitter account sharing the same username (saladinxi), and even a wallet address (0xe366Fc3f537d1eb9119a49e152D78B5fD005589A).
There’s a lot of dots to connect here, but at the time it was all readily available online for anyone to view. Several of these accounts have been deactivated or deleted since the discoveries were made, which only indicates that he was trying to cover his tracks.
Omega even admitted in one of these tweets that he was the owner of Eidha.com.
A quick Google search for “eidha” brings up several social media accounts for the brand, some of which are still active at the time of this writing.
The community was able to connect dozens of dots in record time, uncovering a veritable buffet of possible leads.
Here’s a collection of screenshots taken by various community members that tell part of the story. This information is presented here so the community to get a glimpse of what we discovered as we searched; we make no claims against the owners of these accounts.
Omega’s Identity
We started piecing everything together, and the bigger picture became clear. Much of what was revealed lined up with everything we already knew about Omega.
Once direct contact was established he reactivated his accounts in an attempt to be seen as trying to resolve the issues the community uncovered. It was confirmed through a subsequent phone call with him that everything that had been uncovered was indeed correct.
For obvious reasons this information cannot be listed here, but includes Omega’s true identity, home address, birthdate, family business records, and more. This information has been passed onto to the appropriate authorities.
Omega released a statement about distributing the treasury back to the community as if nothing had happened, claiming he only deactivated the accounts due to the negative comments he was receiving.
This would only prove to be a stall tactic as we would later discover, but at the time it appeared as though Omega knew he had been caught red handed and wanted to at least try and make good.
However, the situation wasn’t as clear cut as a rogue founder trying to make off with a treasury. There were signs of systematic defrauding of investors throughout the life of the Louverture protocol, which will be elaborated upon below.
Unraveling The Plot
Was Louverture, as Omega claimed, a failing protocol that was being shut down benignly, or was it in fact the victim of systematic mismanagement and fraud?
On-chain transactions would suggest the latter.
If the situation were as simple as rescuing the treasury and ensuring its funds get distributed back to the community in the wake of Louverture being shut down, that would be one thing. The problem, of course, was that the treasury had been seriously depleted in the weeks leading up to the shut down, under the guise of making investments for the long-term sustainability of the protocol.
Many of these “investments” were made without warning, with very little input from the rest of the team. Most notably, interim VC Lead MrMohawk had no say or involvement in them, which was a red flag in and of itself.
The following investments were called into question by the community:
The Degenerates: $400,000
STEPN: $30,000
RealT: $200,000
Yield Nodes: $100,000
Bobble Finance: $199,000
Upon combing through the transactions associated with these investments, it has been proven beyond reasonable doubt that they never occurred. Some of the projects being invested into were actually wholly made up, such as The Degenerates. Others were legitimate projects that simply never saw an actual dime from the Louverture treasury.
The money, it seems, was being funneled into personal wallets owned by Omega, only to be siphoned into centralized exchanges like Coinbase.
Other than Boundless and Wyndblast, the two VC investments overseen by MrMohawk, it was discovered that all of the investments made following these were in some way fraudulent and were meant as a cover story and distraction only. Behind the scenes, these funds were being funneled elsewhere.
How could this happen, though?
As several team members could attest, toward the end communication was practically nonexistent. Days would go by without so much as a “hey” in Slack, yet investments would materialize out of nowhere. No team meetings, no gameplan, no direction, no leadership.
It was assumed that several team members had either become disinterested in the project due to the poor market conditions or had been let go for one reason or another. Those who remained and were engaged soldiered on for the sake of the community.
Since the protocol treasury was controlled by Omega and the rest of the multisig holders, there was no need to communicate these dealings to the rest of the team. In hindsight, the reason for this was obvious: there was foul play involved.
The fake investments were nothing more than an elaborate exit strategy. These were community funds that were supposed to be used to keep Louverture afloat and even reward holders, yet they were being sucked out of the treasury for personal gain.
The evidence is all on the blockchain:
Unfortunately, the foul play didn’t begin with the fake investments. Based on the evidence and testimony from former devs of the project, it is highly likely that substantial amounts of money were extracted from the protocol from the very beginning.
Back in January, conflicts with a few of the original developers of the project caused quite a stir. Omega was accused of stealing funds (several hundreds of thousands in AVAX) and also not paying these developers an agreed upon amount for their work on the project.
At the time, the tenuous evidence put forth by these individuals wasn’t enough to properly connect all the dots and actually pin anything on Omega. Most of the community sided with Omega and the allegations failed to stick.
However, in light of the rug, these allegations resurfaced, bolstered by additional evidence. A shocking pattern of fraud was revealed:
Since the very beginning of Louverture, an obscene amount of money has entered and left Omega’s personal wallet, totaling in the millions of dollars. A great deal of these funds have been traced back to Louverture marketing, dev, and treasury wallets, only to be spent on random NFTs and DeFi tokens.
This information is still being compiled and will be added here later for reference. However these transactions are all visible by viewing the history on this wallet: 0xe366Fc3f537d1eb9119a49e152D78B5fD005589A.
Negotiating a Resolution
This was a whole lot bigger than just figuring out how to save the treasury. Close to 1 million dollars had been siphoned out of the treasury in the name of fake investments, but that was only the beginning. According to those who have studied the transactions and wallets involved, it is possible that the total sum of money involved comes in at over 4 million dollars.
A sizable portion of these funds belonged to the community. It was their investment into the LVT token and the protocol as a whole that grew the treasury in the first place and also funded a large portion of the marketing and development wallets.
Once Omega reactivated the Louverture Twitter account as well as his own Omega account, several community members reached out to him in a peaceful manner in an attempt to start working out a resolution.
It was thought that because he had resurfaced and was discussing a treasury disbursement to the community, that he was worried about the ramifications of his actions and wanted to repair the situation as best as possible.
At first, it appeared as though there was some headway being made. Omega seemed open to not only a treasury disbursement that included the money from the fake investments, but possible relinquishing of the entire Louverture protocol to trusted parties.
Leaving the actual treasury disbursement up to the very figure that rugged the protocol wasn’t a smart option, at least from the community’s perspective. The ideal scenario would be a transfer of the multisig keys1 so that everything could be handled by the community.
Although Omega seemed open to this plan in the beginning, as the days dragged on it became obvious that his willingness to discuss a resolution was just more smoke and mirrors. No resolution was agreed upon because there was no intention of transferring anything or disbursing the treasury, at least at the time of this writing.
He was also caught moving $200,000 around in the background while claiming to be negotiating a resolution with us.
The Louverture protocol was fully operational and did not need to be shut down or abandoned. The treasury belonged to the community and still had ample funds before being siphoned. Bear market aside, Louverture was set up fairly well to weather these poor market conditions. Many community members professed their desire to see the protocol continue, even if it meant voting on a disbursement that would allow those who wanted to leave to wash their hands of the protocol.
The future of the protocol would be left up to the community. However, this is not possible so long as Omega has the multisig keys.
No written agreement or proposal has yet been presented to us by Omega, but he made some of his “terms” known, including wanting us to doxx our personal information to him, a known scammer. This was a wild request and absolutely out of the realm of possibility.
At the time of this writing, the community is still willing to work out a resolution that includes a fair disbursement based on calculated loss incurred per investor. Continuing the protocol under new leadership based on community vote is also an option.
Either way, Omega has no right to walk away with the community funds.
Taking Legal Action
With hope of a community-driven resolution slim, the only recourse left for us is legal action.
As of right now, several steps have already been taken, including an anonymous tip to Interpol.
A version of this article is also being prepared for the authorities and includes names, addresses, and all other relevant information.
While it is true most ruggers get away with their crimes, most crypto scam artists are also not so easily identified. Legal action in this case is practically unavoidable, because the Louverture community deserves better, they deserve a resolution.
No promises can be made in terms of a resolution or compensation. There is no guarantee we will get the protocol back or if we will see a cent from the treasury. However, we stand with the community and will continue to work on your behalf to see what can be done. I would like nothing more than for Omega to come clean, return everything that has been stolen, and allow the community to continue the Louverture protocol or receive compensation through a fair distribution.2
We also firmly believe that for the wider crypto space to move forward, these kinds of scammers must be ousted and brought to justice through the appropriate channels. Public trust is so important for the growth of this sector, yet this isn’t possible without action being taken to deter scammers.
DeFi protocols like Louverture show immense promise in terms of the future of finance, but it’s impossible to gauge the success of this sector when you have founders and devs sucking treasuries dry and walking off with the very funds that investors have entrusted to them to protect.
This article is not just a summary of events thus far as they relate to the rug of Louverture, it is a collective call to action for the wider DeFi community to do some soul searching and start cleaning house.
We will continue to update the community as it pertains to possible disbursement procedures or if the protocol continues on in any form.3
Links and Wallet Addresses
For the benefit of anyone investigating.
Omega’s Wallet: 0xe366Fc3f537d1eb9119a49e152D78B5fD005589A
Marketing Wallet: 0xf0634Fb057058E350f43A10872c88818E96C0AEc
Dev Wallet: 0x0F21e7929e33486931A788655245f9999c15c708
Treasury 1: 0x0a06F535D20e4F51B74dbB2CfE7565baE1Eb55AF
Treasury 2: 0x051d6213F7186F31f40f3E2aC9e7c8c682fDF1C9
Orb Society Pay: 0xf8A0AB5A2298A027f581E2CAF3279E86F6685073
Crabada Wallet: 0x4f697cf77dd7c9248140c8086553e29578216ad2
Wallet Omega Sent 1 Mil to: 0x7aad7840f119f3876ee3569e488c7c4135f695fa
Wallet Omega Sent 800K to: 0x187b2d576ba7ec2141c180a96edd0f202492f36b
Wallet Omega Sent 1 Mil to: 0x0cC547952752FcCe6ccb7AD89545cF626d4a958A
Another Wallet tied to Omega: 0xA267b582782634b1f19363De4B57d934D491BbEd
If you have any information you believe could aid in the investigation of this matter, please contact the UK’s National Fraud and Cyber Crime Reporting Centre.
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This article is supported in part by HoloSlabs.
DISCLAIMER: All of the information presented in this article is publicly available and is intended for general informational purposes only.
No one knows exactly who holds the multisig keys at this time.
Weeks prior to the rug I outlined a marketing / brand strategy and handed it to Omega as I felt nothing was moving. Proposed ideas included increasing Orb Society payouts and doubling down on community driven marketing initiatives, opening up the marketplace with new art collections and Louverture ecosystem NFT items, creating a VC application page for projects looking for funding, and adding a resource center to the dapp that would educate new investors and act as a DeFi knowledgebase managed by the Orb Society. These are some of the ideas that we could potentially implement if control of the protocol was transfered to the community.
Special thanks to everyone that contributed to help put this article together, as well as the whole Louverture community. You’re why we’re here.