Horse Molestation Joke Sets Crypto World on Fire – Rolling Stone
The cryptocurrency scene is the wild west. One day, members of your decentralized finance platform elect you to serve as CEO. The next fends off rumors of fraud and jokes of bestiality.
This is the difficult position that the boss (or “chef”) of SushiSwap, an exchange and lending marketplace that offers various tools to crypto investors, currently finds himself in.
Jared Grey, a former IT consultant who went on to found and lead exchanges Bitfineon and EONS Finance, was appointed to the job on October 3, according to a Twitter announcement from SushiSwap. He claimed 84 percent of the vote in the organization after months of internal debates on their Discord server about how to fill a leadership vacuum. (In September 2021, a co-founder known as 0xMaki relinquished management duties; that December, CTO Joseph Delong also resigned, adding to the operation’s woes.)
Gray tweeted that he was “excited” to take the reins and get SushiSwap back on track.
But on 10 October there was a turn for the worse. That’s when a crypto enthusiast with the Twitter handle @YannickCrypto accused Gray of being a “swindler” and a “swindler” — and, Rolling stone has learned, a Twitter troll managed to snowball what he claims is an uproar over horse abuse.
As for the initial allegations, the details are complex, but essentially @YannickCrypto and others believe Gray is responsible for a robbery of 70 percent of the funds from a former crypto project, ALQO. They say that in 2019 he covered this theft by switching currency from one blockchain to another, then converting it under EONS.
The thread includes other allegations of impropriety on Grey’s part dating back to 2012, though the ALQO incident is at the heart of the outrage, and @YannickCrypto linked to a dormant Twitter accounting who had accused ALQO of being a scam in 2019. If nothing else, it’s clear that the outcome of this crypto experiment led to some bitter grudges among those involved.
Gray set out to debunk these rumours, blaming the scandal on a former business partner. He pointed to a blog post from the time that posted how a network member Yannick#0007 – the same @YannickCrypto – had reported a link between compromised online wallets and one controlled by the partner, who was the CTO and co-founder. According to Grey, the partner resisted any further investigation into these breaches, so Gray fired him on suspicion of theft and refunded users whose wallets had been emptied. (The partner, who did not appear to issue a statement after Gray accused him of stealing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Let me be clear,” Gray tweeted. “The allegations against me are 100% false.”
However, before Gray had even had a chance to defend himself against fraud charges, this drama had been eclipsed by a distant stranger.
In response to @YannickCrupto’s thread about Grey, a Twitter user named @jcryptooooo asked: “Is this the same guy who fingered a horse?” Crypto shitposters immediately took the baseless insinuation and ran with it, creating a parallel narrative that Gray had molested an animal. Then came the memes and market commentary as $SUSHI, the Ethereum token that powers SushiSwap, dropped in value by 10 percent — though of course it’s impossible to tell whether it was @YannickCrypto’s “con man” post or the horse stuff that primarily drove deep. Commenting on a $SUSHI price chart that suggested it was the latter, @jcryptooooo joked that the currency was headed for a “bottom signal”, the point of lowest valuation where investors can pick up an asset on the cheap before it climbs again.
In Twitter DMs with Rolling stone, Gray vehemently denies the allegations of animal cruelty. “Are you asking me if I ever had sex with a horse or violated one?” he says. “No, the answer is no. I think it was mostly a troll that somehow got through.” Asked about @YannickCrypto’s allegations, he says: “At this point I will release a comment detailing each accusation and the details surrounding them.”
Rolling stone reached out to @jcryptooooo for comment and confirmed that they had planned to sow chaos from the start. “I was just scrolling through Twitter and doing my usual thing,” they say. “I probably have a higher number of people who have blocked me than I do followers, as I like to call out a lot of the nonsense/bullshit posts I read on crypto-Twitter.” When they stumbled upon @YannickCrypto’s thread, it inspired them to revive an old gag. “When I was younger, me and some mates used to joke around when talking about people, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the same guy who flipped/fingered [insert animal]?’ they explain.
“And yeah, so it was just a question and crypto-Twitter just pounced on it,” says @jcryptooooo, adding a clown emoji. “Some of the memes since the first fingering question have been absolute fire.”
There are a few likely reasons Why crypto Twitter could not resist the bait. First, SushiSwap was designed as an “evolution” of the decentralized exchange platform Uniswap, which has a unicorn logo. And what is a unicorn if not a mythical type of horse? Then there is the anarchic, youthful, extremely online spirit of the crypto scene. Adding to the build-up, SushiSwap tweeted a horse emoji as he cited speculation that the gossip was elaborate viral marketing. Gray jumped on that tweet as well, saying, “It’s true; stable pools are coming this week.” (In the DM he says none of this was a marketing ploy, and his mail wan’t a serious one, just a “tongue-in-cheek” reaction to “being memed to death.”) And in what some have suggested is a rye-pull scam, someone created a new coin called $HORSHE.
“Could only have happened on crypto Twitter,” says @jcryptooooo.
Grey, looking for clarity on how all this happened, shared a flawed but amusing theory. “There’s a male porn star with my exact name (it’s been the bane of my existence),” he wrote on the SushiSwap Discord on Monday. “Maybe he soiled a horse?!”
A quick look at other Jared Grey’s credits reveal a rundown of porn titles, but mostly with mainstream brands like Brazzers, who would never illegally produce bestiality videos. Rolling stone reached out to actor Gray via his Instagram account, but he didn’t respond, hopefully sparing himself the indignity of learning about any of this.
None of these, by the way, come close to the biggest controversy in SushiSwap’s short history: Shortly after its inception in late 2020, a pseudonymous co-founder named Chef Nomi apologetically returned $14 million in ether to the exchange after liquidating his stake in $SUSHI, causing a price drop of 73 percent and drew widespread criticism from users who said he had cheated them. Chef Nomi then handed control of the project to Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of crypto exchange FTX, in a move that would start the shaky chain of succession that continues to this day. Some time after saving it from collapse, Bankman-Fried also walked away from SushiSwap and told Bloomberg in December 2021 that he was no longer involved with the platform.
Despite the recent ruckus, $SUSHI may not be heavily impacted in the medium term: the token, at the time of writing, is down another 2.56 percent for the day, but is still up 12.34 percent for the week. It just goes to show that in crypto, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
