The Kiwi crypto advertised by porn star Stormy Daniels that boomed and collapsed

Depending on where you sit, Unvest’s founder Kiran Matthews​ embodies the worst cliches of the cryptobro, or he is a visionary, trying to push the sector forward.

He is heavily tattooed, has long hair, and often appears wearing a cowboy hat. His LinkedIn profile picture is himself in a zen prayer pose, and he hosts a twitch-style stream on YouTube where he provides updates on what’s happening behind the curtain at Unvest.

In many ways, the crypto Matthews founded is equally dichotomous. It has characteristics of the pump and dump schemes that plague the market, but it also has a use case, and the potential for wide adoption.

Unvest is intended as a service allowing early investors in other new cryptos to trade their locked-up interests before they vest, or become officially tradable.

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Last September the Unvest coin, called the UNV token​, opened for trading at US10 cents, according to Coinmarketcap.com.​

The token jumped 300% quickly, but by early-January the token was worth less than US1c, and Coinmarketcap.com no longer tracks it.

Coingecko.com still does, and records the coin being now worth about a third of a US cent.

Like so many of the start-ups operating within the speculative and largely unregulated crypto market, with Unvest, it’s hard to sort truth from spin.

Unvest employed many techniques synonymous with pump-and-dump schemes, where a group creates a buying frenzy, then dumps a coin quickly at an inflated price, usually crashing the crypto.

Unvest had a Telegram channel where excitement was drummed up to fever pitch.

It also had its own high-profile celebrity endorsement. Where Crypto.com had Matt Damon famously proclaiming ‘fortune favours the brave’, Unvest had adult porn star Stormy Daniels.

Unvest’s other promo material is a confusing mash of crypto-bro tropes, technical finance lingo, confusing acronyms, stock market-style ticker-tapes, and made-up terms like “liquid vesting token”.

University of Auckland commercial law associate professor Alex Sims studies cryptocurrencies, and says any project that uses a celebrity to gain notoriety should be avoided.

“If you’re just going on some Pornhub advertising you deserve to lose everything, because you are stupid. I’m sorry, but you are stupid,” she says.

However, Sims says Unvest is unusual, because it does appear to be trying to fill a need in the market, and in principle, it is a good idea.

Some of those behind it also had experience at the likes of Google and buy-now-pay-later service Laybuy, she says.

Jamie Gardner, who is listed on Unvest’s website as an adviser, said the Stormy Daniels video was an effort of Matthews’ to draw in the “degens” – a crypto term meaning degenerates, or people who don’t really believe in or know much about a coin, who are just out to make a quick buck.

Matthews says the advert was an effort to stir conversation in a competitive market.

“We thought it was a pretty surreal and funky idea given Stormy’s involvement in the Trump scandal in recent years. Also, adult advertising is extremely cost-effective,” he says.

Unvests marketing in 2021 was “designed to fit the culture and tone of the cryptocurrency space in 2021”, Matthews says.

Now that the market has cooled off, Matthews says it makes sense to focus on technical achievements and “less on shock value”.

For Sims, any hyping of a project is another red flag.

“The people who are doing the actual useful good stuff, they are deliberately keeping a low profile,” she says.

A lot of people will have lost money on Unvest, but there will have been those who bought low and sold high, walking away with a good payout, Sims says.

Matthews doesn’t seem to have done badly. Despite the coin being mid-collapse in November, he was able to pay $2.3 million for a home in Auckland’s foothills.

But he says the home wasn’t bought with proceeds from the startup.

“I have a mortgage and prior to starting Unvest had a successful career in fintech. I currently work full time on Unvest and draw a salary as CEO, some of which goes towards mortgage payments,” he says.

Those continuing to work on the project are paid from startup capital raised from institutional investors, Matthews says.

“We operate a New Zealand company and pay tax in New Zealand. We do not fund operations through the sale of UNV tokens. The team has not personally sold any UNV tokens since launch,” he says.

Registered in the British Virgin Isles

While he might be the sole director of Unvest Ltd, which is a New Zealand registered company, Unvest Ltd itself is fully owned by Unvest Corporation, a company registered in the British Virgin Isles.

Gosh says this is common, and was recommended by the venture Capital firms that backed Unvest at its seed stage.

Knowing exactly what Unvest is doing today is tricky.

Gardner is Australia-based and runs Cryptomedia.co, a consultancy for crypto projects, and says his company continues to help Unvest fix bugs in its systems.

Unvest’s website was also recently updated, but getting to the bottom of something as basic as what the UNV token can be used for, or how it could be used in future, isn’t easy.

Gardner says the UNV token was not incorporated with the function of the system at launch, and was a speculative asset with no practical use.

The company’s website now claims fees taken to facilitate users trading on the platform will be used to buy back UNV tokens, which are then destroyed or “burnt”.

“Meaning that as adoption increases, UNV tokens become more scarce,” the website states.

This is intended to help push the value of the coin back up.

But Matthews says this is currently “an intended design” that will become an automated process, but there remains technical hurdles.

He says the UNV token is intended to eventually be used to unlock software features on the trading platform, but in the interest of growing market share the company has made it free to use for startups.

“Companies like Dropbox, Google, Airbnb all operated under similar models during their early years. Charge low or no fees for business users while scaling, then monetise once a sizeable market has been built.”

Gardner says there’s a reason the UNV token is struggling to gain value quickly.

”Unvest is in a unique position where all the tech [is] built out and the majority of the tokens have now unlocked, so we are basically at the bottom.”

How it works

When a new crypto is being developed, early investors usually provide funding in exchange for tokens, which become the coin itself once the project goes live.

Investors are able to trade or sell their coins at pre-arranged points post-launch, when the coins “vest”.

Gardner says this “vesting schedule” usually happens over about 10 months, with investors able to sell a proportion of their coins at different points in time.

This stopped early investors offloading all their coins (which they would get at a discount) in one go, which could crash the price of the coin – a crash many would never recover from.

Unvest is intended to allow early investors to trade their locked-up tokens in transactions held off exchanges, with Unvest taking a cut for facilitating the transactions.

The idea was to capitalise on the booming 2021 crypto market by allowing people to trade locked coins, essentially a new method of speculation in a market already rife and arguably built on speculation.

Matthews says Unvest is live and working on four different blockchains. (Most major cryptos operate on their own blockchain, which is essentially a digital ledger used to track transactions.)

Unvest is also expanding into other products, including peer to peer swaps.

Down, but possibly not out

Unvest is unquestionably down, but it might not be out.

The coin appears to be making a modest resurgence from June, when it was worth a tenth of a US cent, to being worth a third of a US cent.

Sims says the recovery of a crypto after it tanks is unusual, but not impossible, and the fact that there’s an identifiable person behind Unvest and work is still continuing will help.

Matthews says he expects to continue releasing new features and improvements while attracting more users for Unvest’s products.

“With rising interest rates and global uncertainty, it’s not surprising that assets like cryptocurrency, tech stocks and even real estate are down. We may not see the crypto market improve dramatically until global economic conditions change for the better,” he says.

Sims points out because Unvest’s collapse happened before the current crypto crash, it is unlikely to be linked.