Coffeezilla, a popular YouTuber and researcher who regularly investigates influencer fraud, said the Rabbit R1 was “built on fraud” and slammed the startup behind it.
Steven Findeisen, better known by the username Coffeezilla, has over 3.47 million subscribers, and around 1.5 million people watched his latest YouTube drop, which was published on Tuesday (May 21).
Coffeezilla claims that the company behind the AI gadget, Rabbit R1, was previously called Cyber Manufacturing Co., and that the name change happened just two months before the launch of the handheld assistant.
Cyber Manufacture reportedly raised $6 million in November 2021 for its “next-generation NFT project GAMA.”
Jesse Lyu, CEO of Rabbit Incorporation, described GAMA as a “fun little project.”
However, Coffeezilla accuses the founder and CEO of being much more serious about the project than he initially suggested.
Old recordings of Rabbit R1 founder Jesse Liu discovered
The YouTuber discovered an old Clubhouse clip of Jessie Liu talking about GAMA, in which Liu says, “I don't want to create GAMA, and I don't want anyone to make GAMA into a promotion or a throwaway program. This is a legitimate team with millions of dollars behind it. Essentially, we're putting millions of dollars into it to make sure it's a next-level experience.”
The recording continues with the founder talking about GAMA Coin and how it has the potential to be “not only the first carbon neutral, but actually carbon negative cryptocurrency 2.0, or Bitcoin 2.0.”
At this point, Coffeezilla asks the audience, “But where did those millions go? When the company changed to Rabbit, where did that money go? Did it go towards developing Rabbit, which was a completely different project?”
He claims that investors in the GAMA project have yet to receive their money back, and he estimates the refunds to be around $1 million.
A pop-up that appears on the screen at the seven-minute mark states that Rabbit Inc. claims that the $6 million in venture funding it raised for the GAMA project was used solely for that project.
Rabbit's reaction to Coffeezilla after the R1 video
When Coffeezilla reached out after inquiring about the GAMA project and the possibility of a refund, the team at Rabbit Incorporation responded.
“There is no way to actually ‘refund’ the NFTs unless the owners themselves agree to ‘burn’ the NFTs on the blockchain. Again, I don’t agree with calling the GAMA projects ‘abandoned’ as they were open sourced and given back to the community in line with community feedback.”
“This claim by Jesse that you mentioned is taken out of context. The situation at the time was that there was a group of people attempting to engage in unscrupulous wash trading and reselling of NFTs. To prevent that trend from escalating, Jesse made the decision to buy back NFTs from these sellers in order to maintain balance and order in the community and the market.”
Featured Image: Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
