Final Call For Winter Bears?

37 min readApr 28, 2022

Why yes for change at Winter Bears

TLDR: I am going to talk you through a number of areas that concern me and should you, with present Winter Bear leadership. Many have already checked out from Winter Bears, for those on the fence — this is for you.

You need to read this.

When this document is complete, you will understand why we will propose a community led project (Name TBC by community) and why I can never support the existing regime.

Sign up by following our twitter: https://twitter.com/savewinterbears

A summary of disasters

Background

None of what I write here is exhaustive, but it is extensive. It is still a fraction of the issues spotted, recorded and evidenced.

The Winter Bears project has been beset by greater delays comparable to peer launched NFT projects, loss of interest, low community engagement, deceptive marketing practices, staff exploitation and no clearly defined ‘desired’ USP.

These problems led to a gradual loss of faith from the community, the staff team and business partners. They have also resulted in the wider NFT community seeing no reason to trade, hold or more. This is noted in the absence of volume in trading.

On public Twitter spaces, the founding team were caught being dishonest to holders and to partners, it is apparent under their watch they are not fit for the job.

Leaders must take responsibility for their actions and their inactions. Leaders have a duty to consider the implications of the language they use and the optics they create. They must be decisive and they must be honestly empathetic. They must be brave, they must be humble.

2 days ago, they were terminated from their Pixlverse partnership and not a word has been said by 0xNushi or by the project Twitter, 48 hours in. Is this bravery, is this humility? Is this honesty?

Every negative framing of Winter Bears is a result of poor leadership. Leaders must be prepared to take ownership of those mistakes and if they are out of their depth, then it is time they hand over the reins to an option that has support.

In this case it is a community run team.

How that looks is, it seems academic with the founding team’s refusal to negotiate what would be a handsome settlement and a chance to walk away.

With the noted stress they are experiencing despite limited execution and minimal engagement (by their own words) — one must ask if it is sheer delusion or something more sinister as to why this is not on the table.

On the Twitter Spaces 23rd April 2022 — I asked a question of Nushi
“Given the clear sentiment and feeling around the founding team, would you be willing to offer a binding poll on handover of power to the community?”

Nushi’s reply was if that is what the community wanted.

A day later within the Winter Bear discord — when pressed for how we begin this process, this initial willingness to accept discussions transformed to this response:

“A community handover would only be a final final resort.” We did not and I certainly did not when asking the question, frame it as a final final resort.

This climb-back with no route to enforce such an action, without their say so is emblematic of their leadership. There is an autocracy there.

It is true that it is ultimately their project BUT it is also true that when you sell someone a product or service and it does not achieve the deliverables promised you are in breach of contract.

What are the deliverables here? They are many for many people. The drop in price is simply the damages, the deliverables are those such as specific giveaways that never happened, donations that never happened, NFTs with unique utility that can now never happen.

If you purchased on the basis of those commitments and they are rescinded, you have a case for breach of tort. This means you have the right to claim to be made whole again. This could run into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds/dollars and would render the project insolvent.

This is why a settlement to the community would be the smartest move for all.

NB: I have made it clear and I will do again now, that were I to be involved in any transition, I would not be a wallet signatory, now or ever. I have no desire for that responsibility. Remember this. Save this, screenshot this. I am here to help and then get on with having fun again.

I want to be known for doing something impressive, something that makes people smile and that is the reward I need here alone. Maybe send me some coffee too :)

Transparency

There have been recent requests for transparency around several key areas. Not to exhaust the point, these have included:

How much of the total minted/raised funds by the project do you consider to be your personal funds or ‘shareholder’ funds for the entity that owns this? How much is earmarked at this point for the project deliverables.
What are your names? What are your professional resumes?
Is there a company — what is the legal entity and in what jurisdiction?
Do you have accounting/book-keeping/management accounts or cash flow forecasts you can share with the community to evidence your organised, and prudential oversight?
Can you share updates of what each member does in the project and where operations are at in a timely and regular manner.

These questions are not exhaustive and do not represent all items asked, but they cut to the very heart of what it means to be transparent.

In a public company, in a dated financial world, using legacy systems we are still able to know the following:

Names
Salaries
Bonuses
Accounting records
Budget forecasts
Trading updates
Company structure and beneficial ownership

To offer none of these elements and continue to claim ‘transparency updates’ on Twitter and Discord, is utterly disingenuous when the questions remain unanswered.

If your first ‘massive transparency update’ was sufficient, you possibly would not have needed to make your next appearance on twitter — 3 weeks later, citing the same thing.

Without transparency — true transparency, where the veil is lifted we have no recourse to defend our rights.

Ethics

Beyond the failure to meet deliverables there’s also a question of ethics. Strong ethical values are the sign of conscientious leaders. The adherence to ethics shows us much about the person. They show an understanding of their audience, self awareness and they give hope that even with accountability, they may not require it.

Not having ethical values is on the inverse, dangerous. If there is no accountability, there is no telling the steps that one might take to achieve their personal aims. If those aims do not align with widely held moral/ethical stances on how to run a business/project/team or brand — you have a leader who is likely to bring problems on themselves and those that work with them.

We are seeing this play out as we speak.

Ethical Claim 1

The founders on October 19th 2021 sent 5 Eth to an influencer to buy Winter Bear NFTs with.

This deceives the market into the perceived demand or value of the project.

Using investor’s money to hand to an influencer to buy more of the project with, to raise the floor price is both deceptive and also arguably the very definition of how a Ponzi scheme works.

When challenged the influencer advised it was for giveaways, however this is obviously a troublesome answer for two reasons:

It was never marked as announced for giveaways. Instead Nushi posted a twitter raid in the discord to get holders to pester the influencer. Potentially to make it seem like our work was fruitful.
The project could just send you bears. Nushi held many himself both in Nushi.eth and Zetaleaks.eth wallets.

17 Winter Bears were purchased from October 19th to October 20th. These totalled approx 3.75 Eth in cost of item and of course there would be some gas to consider.

The influencer states it helped the holder amount, but according to the founder it was already pretty good a week before.

I imagine there was a profit there despite protestations that there wasn’t. That’s not my beef, that’s her business, that’s how she DID* things then.

But our concerns are not with 2476 despite the clear implications of that form of marketing, I do want to give balance as well. Despite where memories may differ, she was humble, contrite and this was before she has embarked on her own journey. This isn’t a love in, I want to get to the point.

People act in an irrational manner when they are given false information that is confirmed, or corroborated in some way by those they are meant to trust, namely, the leadership. We are not in a regulated environment, but were we to be and we may find we are, misleading statements (formerly a section 397 offence, now a section 95 under Financial Services Act 2012) are criminal acts of deception (fraud).

(Image to indicate possibly financial promotion language)

They result in prison sentences to directors under what is known strict liability laws. It’s for this reason public companies have a duty to be transparent, ethical and honest.

Look what happens when someone believes misleading or deceptive marketing.

One holder spent money thinking they were about to miss out. Another amplifies a false narrative accidentally.

Vince was about to act in a way that would have seen a financial loss if off this false market demand. Fortunately Vince’s PFP suggests he may have landed on his feet as I type this.

Another amplification — innocent but showing the danger of this behaviour.

One holder raises a good point but it isn’t followed through by others.

I will.

Is it possible, that driven by negative news of the floor price beginning to fall and not being able to handle that debate in the discord, they paid the influencer to buy and then began posting twitter raids such as below to make holders think they are doing something positive?

Check the dates.

These are the receipts, this is why this leadership owes you more than an apology, it owes you the chance to take charge of your project and the funds to make a go of it. And it’s not down to those implicated here to tell you how that should look.

*I am going to leave this claim with this screengrab as it’s only fair to her.

Sorry Artchick, please don’t hate me, it’s kind of cool an influencer talks to me. And therein lies the problem. Who doesn’t like to feel inside some well-known person’s orbit?

Ethical Claim 2

False Claims.

The founders advised buyers of the 3D Bears of its ability to be used in an upcoming Metaverse project known as the Pixlverse. This requires a number of design steps for this to be true, such as ‘rigging’ where the graphic is multi-dimensional.

The delivery though was for a flat image with a 3D aesthetic.

This is not the problem — the issue is that we now have clear and unequivocal evidence from the designers that the project was not rigged, ready for the metaverse and nor had that been paid for or ordered.

This is contrary to claims by the project lead Nushi. Buyers were buying into something that was fundamentally untrue.

This is the designer and 3D engineer of those bears.

The image above is from the designer of the artwork and engineer. He has recently abandoned working with Winter Bears and backs a community alternative. Here is Gurnard’s design partner.

This second image above, shows proof that the 3D Bears are not wearable, they are not ‘rigged’ for metaverse and they no longer have a working relationship with the team who made them. We were told different.

Similarly we got false claims or false promotions in the form ofArt Club and L2 platform revenue share post mint and prior to the change of direction with the first roadmap.

Why do all these things matter?

They matter because they show us the conviction and perseverance as well integrity of a leader.

They matter because if they can lie after they have your money, in front of thousands of people and keep on doing it, time after time, they are not about to change.

I believe in second chances, but I do believe you have to earn it AND you should face the consequences of your actions first.

Lets not put this all on Nushi, in case he hands over to partners. Let’s look at how Ophidian handles this too.

Making a claim that isn’t true, which yields a financial gain can be both negligence and leave yourself open to civil claims for damages, but they can also be criminal matters and in the case of an NFT that perhaps is considered a security one day — even negligent misleading statements will result in a criminal conviction.

This is known as strict liability as I have mentioned earlier but will now dive into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)

If you are telling buyers or investors of a project that ends up becoming an unregulated investment product — that in buying they are going to have a token that is backed by blue chip NFTs — you are making a misleading statement if it is not outright truth. If there are caveats they should be mentioned, or it is reckless, false and misleading.

Unfortunately for the team, they managed to find one of the only people in the UK to have been convicted for it and had them buy into their project.

Yours f’n truly.

The sentence itself is not a big one, maximum is two years so it’s not overly long, the real concern when convicted for it is the liability to civil claims and the proceeds of crime act POCA — money laundering offences that kick in. That’s far worse. Best avoided.

Let’s discuss ideation

Ideation

You might wonder what this term means. It is essentially the ability to develop ideas, consider it perhaps, the creativity of USP. When you think of an idea for a project to implement, you are ideating.

It’s an irritating term for many but the concept is vital. We are all aware of the term ‘Entrepreneur’. It means to effect change. Whether that is social change, environmental, for a community or for a customer base. Being an entrepreneur is not about making money it’s about solving problems. Money output is a by product of successful execution.

Many of you may not have heard the term ‘intrapreneur’. It’s the same, but it’s done within an organisation. Intrapreneurial skills are those shown by people within an organisation to develop new ideas around product development and marketing.

Within an organisation like an NFT this isincredibly important to ensure that the project continues to discover ways to return value to holders. Entrepreneurial skills themselves are important to develop a project that has a place in the market.

Where Winter Bears is coming up short is in both departments.

Winter Bears currently discusses offering a DAO to invest in blue chip projects. Currently and the numbers are unclear, there is either 20 or 40 or 60 Eth available to make those acquisitions.

Claimed Future Utilities

Blue Chip DAO — This is someway short of both Head Dao and Mutant Cats. It offers nothing that doesn’t already exist.
Token — Utilising a method of distribution that no one voted for, it has no mandate of popularity and is simply a medium to represent a share of a vault of no real worth. It is not a selling point.
Metaverse integration — I can of course do this with any project in the Pixlverse and it is not unique to Winter Bears.
Community — There is none to speak of that has widespread support for the leadership.

There really isn’t much else, and I think many are loathed to offer ideas to enrich founders who are not willing to embrace what the community wishes.

I am one of those.

Wabdoteth put it perfectly in a recent Twitter Spaces:

“What does Winter Bears represent?”

There is no story, there is no reason to participate that I can’t already get better elsewhere. It has gone from being potentially unique had they executed early, to being a ‘Me-Too’ project with no reason to need to exist.

Marketing

These are crickets.

The marketing output exists of unethical influencer work as illustrated and little else.

It was the desired wish of Nushi to not use more on trend twitter marketing tactics as seen below.

But memes and shithousery on Twitter aren’t the only option and it is the absence of journalist outreach which surprises me the most, given the founder’s adamant stance the new tokenomic model and DAO is going to be both “Bleeding Edge” and “Revolutionary”.

Also Nushi has claims of content marketing experience. How do you get authority links for that content if you aren’t familiar with #journorequest on Twitter. It’s basic blog outreach principles, so I can only assume you have nothing to say or you are lacking that experience.

From ‘index tokens’ that sound like they have established how to make a share of a fund not be a regulatory breach, to a revolutionary dao staking model, these all strike me as items that would make for relevant newsworthy content in our space.

Why are we not running PR campaigns and building column inches, press attention and raising our profile?

Could it be that there is not much to the story, or the team don’t have real experience at marketing strategy? The only name on the team with experience in any form of marketing is the founder Nushi, who lists his profession as a writer on his Linkedin and Companies House records.

To avoid doxing him fully in this article, I shall leave Companies House elements out of this document.

Whatever the situation is, the recent negative PR meant the project has shown a poor ability to handle crisis communications and illustrates why marketing is more than paying an influencer, but a broad set of skills, including advocacy, outreach and brand voice. None of which the project has a handle on.

Our marketing reflects our own personality. The low engagement for the project’s twitter, is emblematic of an absence of charisma at the top.

With 30,000 followers their recent big update continued that trend in poor engagement.

Part of marketing is reputation management and through poor choices, whether they are deceptive with a provable malice of forethought, or simply utterly negligent, tone deaf and irresponsible, you can create a stain upon your brand that you may never shake.

Once views are formed of you or your brand there is always a lingering dissent or opposition. For this reason, in most public companies, sports team or brands, when a leader creates negative attention, they fall on their sword to save the shareholders, employees job and longevity of the business.

It appears that in this case, despite losing the support of their greatest influential asset Artchick who on the 26th April sided with the community to see a new leadership take place, they will unlikely relent.

Jano former operations manager in response to his nomination by Artchick

This came after ongoing dramas, lack of involvement and negative PR, saw their leading business partners with the Pixlverse integration, terminating the partnership.

It is notable the emphatic comments toward the bottom of the announcement, “changes to the leadership”. This is in reference to their willingness to reconsider entry to the project if leadership changes.

Whether this leadership is Jano, if he even wants it, OR is wanted - is another matter for the community to discuss. But I am acutely aware of the optics on leadership whomever they are, going forward in light of the focus here on unethical marketing, we may want to tread carefully down empowering legacy management.

Marketing is more than manufactured volume with floor sweeps as the DAO 200 bear vault looks to outside observers, it is more than giveaways, it starts with a message, a brand, a story and a strategy. None of which evidently exists here.

We can do better.

Execution

It is commendable that in September 2021, after a couple of days of struggling to shift NFTs, and a discord so empty that Nushi decided to use two logins at once, they managed to sell out.

September in 2021 was a watershed moment in NFTs. It was a mania. To the point that every new mint was sold out in minutes of launch, with such vast demand for the chance of riches.

Source: September 09–2021

https://www.ft.com/content/1ae22d81-4c23-4475-8661-354f1b8dbc7c

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-10bn-volume-now-traded-155716114.html

So while it’s commendable to have raised the money, we have to look at it, in the context of its time. Would they have raised the same funds today?

I am unsure and no one can say, but it is off that they are earning a reputation alone. No substantial progress has been made since then and in fact many initial roadmap claims have been changed or simply given up.

Part of this is evidenced as to why the Pixlverse partnership ended. Little to no progress had been made, and claims of game development in a Twitter spaces when asked for evidence was not provided.

Evidence was not provided to their business partners.

So let’s repeat that point.

On a live Twitter space, they were asked what they were doing or had done in 7 months and the response included focusing on a game.

They were asked if they could provide evidence of this by the following Monday, which they failed to fully do.

Can we trust a leadership who lie to not just us mere gullible fools, but their business partners too?

I can’t.

The first functional utility that has been released by Winter Bears was the result of the work of a community member Fluffykitten.eth who it was later found that had been largely exploited for his work.

NB: Fluffy is an incredibly gifted young man with deep Python skills and is learning Solidity. Please find him on Twitter and give him an opportunity to learn within your project. I hope we can here, but he’s worth more than we may be able to pay him.

For creating the first utility of the project, with some considerable time investment and complexity and asked to mod on the discord also, he was paid 1 Eth for 3 months work. Below minimum wage and frankly not acceptable when your own efforts have to yet to produce anything.

It took 6 months to ideate their first ‘Art Challenge’.

Currently the discord remains unchanged. The take-up is either poor, or their follow through is worse.

It is reasonable to assume that little of what was stated in October 2021 by Nushi, did not hit its delivery date, nor has anyone seen a ‘full feature platform’ on a scalable L2, or knows what that means.

Source: https://medium.com/winter-bears/introducing-winter-bears-art-club-beeb816dac55

Problematic is the roadmap update released in Dec/Jan

A merch store that no one uses — with access gated to holders only does not offer a viable revenue stream to a community to grow.

In fact lets deal with this. How are you going to build a brand, if you sell low quality dropshipping merchandise from a terrible website, with appalling accessibility, failing in a host of heuristics (UX), with a core vitals score that we should be embarrassed of and not focused on external markets or allow them to see it. ‘Merch ain’t it’

Why does this screenshot matter? We are talking about the future of the internet and funding supposed experts in it. If they don’t know the basics of UX, web design, how to sell things to people online, how can we trust them to know how to recruit to improve the brand building or monetisation side of things.

It’s basic skills if you work in e-commerce or online. It’s a website, with some clothes on plugged into a dropshipping platform, I could improve it over a day or two. Ultimately they don’t know what they don’t know. And so they will never understand what is not good about the website AND the brand building strategy from a consumer discretionary goods perspective.

January’s new website never emerged, art club does or doesn’t exist. No one is quite sure. It’s all a blur

And finally the pixlbears integration in the pixlverse requires two things.

Pixlbears
Pixlverse partnership

The community do not have a ‘rigged’ avatar to use as they simply paid for a 3D bear to sell in the 3D bear mint and not a ready to use metaverse avatar model.

They do not have a Pixlverse partnership. But then, they hadn’t really started had they. Feb 26, any game devs out there?

Finally in terms of more simple execution, conducting the initial $40,000 donation to Polar Bears International — never happened.

“Thanks to your support, we are able to go beyond that goal and make a full donation of $40,000 to protect these creatures.” 0xNushi

Here’s Nushi’s reasons for that.

What is remarkable is that this project could not exchange the crypto for fiat currency and hand them the money. Seems a strange hurdle to struggle with. Is this because the money is considered personal funds and there is a concern about exposing personal accounts to these funds?
What I want you to notice is how this text is worded, when Nushi was asked if the donation was made.

What does ‘contributing mean’? It’s a strange phrase to use if you didn’t contribute financially. What are we offering the institute if not money?

Defi expertise for polar bears?

This happens often with Nushi, non explicit answers.

I’d love to know more about that partnership and what it entailed, but we are all still scratching our heads.

No Nushi, you didn’t.

Here’s something they absolutely can’t execute on now. Have you got your Pixbear? Can you use it “in Pixelverse”? (It’s called the Pixlverse mate)

If you own a Winter Bear, here’s Nushi confirming you are going to earn PIXL, play in the space and claim that character. If they don’t provide this, and you have bought or held and seen a financial loss as a result of these false promises, this is a breach of contract.

This is not a hard legal challenge. If you promote that something happens on purchase of an item, or it stops you from selling something and avoid greater losses — then that contract is not completed on, you have recourse.

It’s critical here, that a more rounded, transparent response would be appropriate. Use of the words potentially, or possibly, or ‘whilst not guaranteed’. Omitting language like that, renders you liable to legal claims.

Where the website and discord shows no sign of any legal entity, it is reasonable to assume there is none and one would serve claim on 0xNushi.

These were not the only areas they have failed to execute on — they appeared early on to struggle with giveaways, certainly with NFTs that require a significant investment — aka blue chips.

During mint the roadmap as shown on Wayback, featured a Pudgy Penguin and a Cool Cat to be given away. Around early October, this was updated to remove any reference to the giveaway some would have been promised.

The giveaway is evidenced in Nushi’s Discord post:

They appear to struggle with allocating funds for blue chip NFTs….

Didn’t happen.

Probably won’t.

How is that Blue Chip backed DAO getting on?

How are those acquisitions looking?

The wait for blue chip NFTs continues. We were all let down here and I will show you later there is little evidence this is changing.

Team Performance

So what is behind this level of execution and market view of the project?

The secret is in this post.

Full time in Ethereum since 2016? Really?

Interestingly he also claims on his professional profile that he has worked for nearly 2 years at PieDao. We check this claim, and he stopped working there months before Winter Bears began. This is misleading and paints an artificial picture of his expertise.

NB: He uses a different name on LinkedIn — which is very odd. That’s not his real name — so I am not actually doxing him.

Nushi demands anonymity online, uses a different name in business and shows a lack of detail to negatives on his professional profile. It’s certainly not true to say he doesn’t update his Linkedin.

Not telling the whole truth about his efforts on the project came to a head during a Twitter spaces in front of hundreds of people, when I challenged him with the following question:

“At any time this year have you worked full time on anything else?”

The answer I got was flowery and alluded to some moment in the long past. It was evasive. I asked this question for a few reasons:

He reacted to claims of him not working fulltime in the Discord with shock. Which I had seen.
The output of the project was objectively terrible.
I knew he was spending time island hopping exploring Thailand.
I knew he was working somewhere else as recently as 6 weeks before.

Ultimately, I knew the truth and I wondered if he would be frank and honest about it, in this frank and honest spaces. I wondered if he would patronise our intelligence that we wouldn’t be coming with the receipts.

So what has he been doing?

https://forum.yam.finance/t/2022-03-02-nushi-contributor-request/1625

I’m not here to tell Yam Dao members what that looks like to me, but ‘worked on’, ‘continued to lead’, ‘contributed to’, these do not sound like actual deliverables. All I can really see here is:

Managed social media and wrote a blog. $10,000. Eyeballs emoji eh?

Don’t worry Yam holders, user ‘Coolmetal’ has got your back, let me show you…

…wait — the forum has been edited 5 days ago. After the explosive Twitter spaces the comment and a reply from Nushi was no longer visible on their forum.

Someone or something appeared to have gone further to hide evidence of Nushi’s work. Look what happens when you searched ‘Nushi’ in the search bar.

Nothing about those payment requests— strange when we screenshot a post with his name in the title?

Who controls that censorship? Is Nushi more involved than he states — did he do it, or was someone covering for him to paint a fake picture to new investors?

Whatever it is, I could’t find an honest credible reason to have done that.

So, I explored this further.

I wrote to Yam Finance to give them the opportunity to clarify who has permissions to hide comments. Key point here — the comments don’t appear to have been deleted, they had been marked as hidden.

They very helpfully came back with an answer and didn’t hide from the question which is good to see. So Yam didn’t do it, but it seems in their reply that being able to unlist a thread one begins themselves, may be possible.

I wonder who did then. I’ll leave that for you to calculate.

Thank you though Yam on behalf of investors. Nice move.

Yam have also restored the listing to the search engine, which is a probably a result of it being marked as unlisted.

Which allows us to now see what I wanted to show you:

Here’s Nushi’s reply. Reiterating his work was more strategic and of course if the respondent had any ideas he could suggest them. Not really sure that’s what someone on a 6 figure salary needs to be asking. But I could be wrong

It seems he has been doing a lot of 16 hour days, a lot of strategy and a lot of things that just aren’t ready to release yet. Whether those 16 hour days are for Yam or WB or maybe even another project — who knows.

Ophidian still paid 10 Eth in March — not worked on the project for a while

Ophidian is working on trading bots, unrelated to bears; his words not ours. Perhaps given that he is currently not working on the project and got paid 10 Eth 2–3 weeks ago, maybe the team are focused on trying out his new trading bots.

Ultimately no one knows what is happening, not even Gumption as he contradicts also. We don’t have transparency over remuneration or NFT operating accounts, we get no trading updates or monthly operations reports.

As holders we know nothing of substance.

Winter Bears founders use the word transparency more in the last month than ever during their existence but I ask you to challenge what they refer to as transparency. Transparency means details, nothing obscured.

That transparency clearly didn’t placate the community…

So Nushi tried again after a second poll was run on my own Twitter.

Here’s Nushi with the transparency update.

The main Twitter account tried the same approach too. No actual transparent details, just using the word does not mean transparent.

No, still didn’t work.

It’s not working because transparency requires being open to revealing details that are ordinarily available. Such as the fairly innocuous question:

“Which jurisdiction is your company registered in? And what corporate structure does it have?”

So because they don’t live in the UK ‘for years’ they didn’t think that would be prudent? (I won’t dox home addresses here, but I know this not to be completely true for Nushi. Still listed on the electoral roll in the UK at his father’s address.)

But also — can anyone establish how that is transparency?

Of course, the transparency comes now.

Or does it?

No. They won’t even state where the company is registered or under what legal name the company is called.

To not dox them?

He was clearly evading stating this in the earlier forms of the question, but when reminded the question was from their respected partner’s founder Wabdoteth, he had to be a little more thorough.

This seems reasonable a request?

Two days later their partnership was terminated.

I think we know the answer to Wab’s question.

I think we can also establish why execution has been so poor. The team are busy doing other things, or nothing at all. Nushi will disagree with this

Here’s a picture posted on Instagram April 7th by a guy in Thailand.

Yes Thursday 7th of April — I shan’t post the social media account. But what do you do midweek, reader?

This section has been long, and I wanted to showcase where execution hasn’t happened, and maybe why it has been like that…

…as well as showing the deceit behind their claims.

Some operators in business are poor at executing. They don’t have the aptitude but some just aren’t actually trying.

I will leave you to be the judge.

Character of leadership

There are many traits one associates with leadership. From honesty, integrity, empathy, humility, bravery and ambition.

Drive is another — a project called out publicly by their partners for being the weakest contributor, is certainly not rich in drive or ambition.

Bravery and empathy are what I would like to focus on first.

Does anyone of right mind, believe that given the current circumstances facing the project, sitting on invisible mode and posting ‘right here lurkinn’ is an appropriate response from ‘Gumption Bear’ one of the founders?

Time to save face Gumption…

That really wasn’t why you were on invisible mode was it?

It took him to be called out by a moderator to come off invisible mode and engage.

This is tone deaf, this lacks empathy to the anger of the wider community, and it’s spineless.

This is not bravery. Nor is this Nushi…

Or this…

What are you afraid of?

Hard questions, an inability to challenge your transparency or absence of it?

Well apparently Nushi has received personal threats from me toward he and his family.

This is his own words and also a narrative he is allowing in the main discord for Winter Bears.

This is a huge claim to make.

If it’s true, I’m an awful person, if it’s false it’s defamatory, a court matter and utterly abhorrent a claim to make.

If these claims are false do you still believe he intends to ‘be better’.

Let’s see those claims

Note he references threats he has received. This now takes a turn toward the malicious and with that you may learn a lot about his character.

Nushi tells the world he knows what it takes to improve. One of those things is communication another is transparency.

We know how busy he has been, so busy they have burned out. And I am not dismissing that work stress can burn you out, I experience it myself.

But I do not have the keys to a $2 million wallet sat on an island in Thailand swimming with turtles, with no parental responsibilities, showing nothing for one’s work.

I am a married man with a 4 year old kid, who has turned his life around after having my own run ins with the law, my wife is one tumour away from a stage 4 cancer and I am operating a busy business to keep a roof over our heads; wondering what has happened to the money and faith I and others gave this man.

Don’t talk to me about burn out.

This is what I get in return

This becomes the narrative in the public general chat.

Thankfully I have people who don’t have to take my word for it, I sent them the proof. Also as E6NFT points out, for those that listened to the public AMA, 1700+ at last playback count before, I was very clear:

“I am not going to dox you Nushi”

Unfortunately when one makes awful claims about you and the only way to defend yourself is publishing your right of reply, via a long drawn out Medium article, it inevitably is going to come out, who you are.

That’s on you. No one else.

I have been careful to not publish publicly your home address in the UK which is far more than you frankly deserve.

But it’s not over. Artchick an influential figure now hears the story. We exchange cordial DMs and she is simply repeating what she has heard.

Artchick must hate me by now. (sorry)

But I have sent her the video evidence and hope she has watched it.

There was an additional exchange so I sent her the link. I don’t know if she has watched it, but the video is a screen recording of the DMs I and Nushi have exchanged.

Fortunately where he claimed to have closed the DMs and not screenshotted them, I still had them. Oh yes :)

Perhaps he thought having barred me from the Discord, I wouldn’t see this brazen act of defamation. He doesn’t just take from me with this, he takes from you all too. If I feel like I am not wanted, I won’t help. That’s normal behaviour.

I have done only what I can to help in recent weeks.

I pushed for conditions for the AMA to help you hold them all to account.

I have pushed influential figures to stand up and say something.

I have asked partners to come in and hold them to account.

WE have brought together people who can offer hope and an alternative route forward. But I also have to allocate my life to where it is most productive and healthy.

If you enable this behaviour you enable the worst kind of people.

This is the evidence forever proving the character of the man you call 0xNushi.

WARNING — this contains strong language and one agitated man clearing his name.

This is your leader if you still support him, and for everyone who has tried to help at Winter Bears, this is not surprising.

NFT Leader’s get the community they deserve.

Communities get the leader they deserve.

So what’s it going to be?

If bravery, humility, empathy, HONESTY and courage are important traits of a good leader, what does it say when evidently the project is led by a man without those traits.

You’ve all been lied to and I hope I have made a case for that.

Final Remarks

Despite the length of this document, this is not exhaustive. I have not touched on the depth of legal claims one could go into, but I hope this is sufficient.

It’s time for a change or an acceptance for us that leadership don’t care about the bears, they care about the money.

What’s Next?

A number of holders old and new have come together under one banner to offer holders of Winter Bear collections an alternative path, I invite you to learn more.

Join the twitter @savewinterbears or connect with my own twitter @ realtokenomist to stay up to date.

We are building an NFT project with community governance correct from day 1. We will aim to give you the project we all deserve.

A snapshot will have been taken as you read this, to ensure no trading in existing winter bears collections to secure allowlist spots would send royalties to the present leadership.

We are at your service.

Thanks to…

I can’t begin to name every single person as there are too many, I would hate to leave anyone out. But if you want to go on the record publicly supporting this, I will add your twitter handle here.

But I must give some special thanks to five people in particular who have tried to offer so much and have so often been ostracised or gas lit.

BladeOx

Hamball

Brisko

WilliamWonka24

And of course no can forget our Moses…

Larkinz

Also for contributing to this effort, report or our aims to protect holders

From Jage, to Polohz, CreativeNFT, Brendo, Bob, LOCS, Whale_Life, Needmoreredbull, Gurnard, Pelocolo, Ryankelm, Kolt.eth, Fluffy, one dromedary and partners, Virezko, EastCoast, Nik the General for always retweeting, Errlshatter, Raspberry, Zachdpt, Ooja, Drewzclues, Skytra, Hippityhop, Francotir, E6NFT, Mr Rager, Persuey, Frank12345, Kyle.70, V.E.Nez, Lisamck, Diamondodnam, Cinch, TheChancellor and Bushcamplife. There are more, I’ve been writing this for days, I will add others, I just want you to know if you are in the Angry Bears discord or even if you are not, if you have been open to me talking lately, or thrown me a like, I have noticed it and you helped.

This made me the happiest of all though