credit: https://twitter.com/ONOxuke
I am accepting this challenge from @indigoocean to share the worst investment I ever made.
This story will be different from other investment stories because I consider my time to be the most valuable asset I own.
I can never get my time back from the past, and that is why I consider ONO to be the worst investment of my entire life. The time I spent wrapped up with ONO could have been spent on my own artwork that I could tokenize now. So, losing that time and energy is a big loss. I took a big hit to trusting my own judgment also, plus the people who got involved with ONO because of me is what I feel the worst about. I could not tell that Ke Xu was not trustworthy.
I believe I was lied to, deceived and misled. I take full responsibility though, and I quit working with Ke Xu once I got enough red flags. What irks me though, is that I could never find the data to prove that Ke Xu lied to me. I think this is the worst part of this story.
As far as money is concerned, I believe I may have broke even, but to be honest, I am not sure. I was paid for my work, but I also invested in the ONOT token sale. There are some things they didn’t pay for that they should have paid for. For example, when I went to Chicago to get my visa for China, I paid for the entire trip myself. This should have been paid for by ONO.
I have had problems with sociopaths in the past, as one of my ex’s was a sociopath, and it’s very dangerous for me to get emotionally caught up with them. I believe that Ke Xu, founder of ONO is a sociopath. I did meet her in person in China, and there are a number of things that make me think she’s either a sociopath, or has sociopathic attributes.
Me and Ke Xu, photo credit: Ke Xu, taken in China, in a Chinese Uber SUV
Working closely with Ke Xu, was full of highs and lows and also filled with a lot of excitement. The fact that she’s female also played a role in my interest in ONO. She also is a very unusual woman in many respects, with her being a high stakes poker player. I think this part of her story is true, as she seemed to have the right temperament for it. Personally, I think she should be a poker player and not try to run a business.
Where I Went Wrong
I naively assumed that because she’s female, she had certain characteristics and that we might be able to become partners at some point in the future. This was my first error in judgment.
I cannot remember how I first learned about ONO, but it was within the EOS ecosystem that I stumbled upon it. I was looking for new crypto projects to pour my energies into, and this one really seemed to be a good one. I read the white paper, which was a beautifully written one, very different from other crypto projects, and after fully researching ONO and Ke Xu, I felt confident.
She was, afterall, in Forbes, and this added a lot of credibility in my mind:
She also had proof of prior projects that she founded, ERA being one of them:
photo credit: ERA app
So, why do I think Ke Xu is a sociopath?
She’s either a sociopath or a terrible person because of this one thing: she doesn’t know how to connect emotionally with other people. She described in-depth about her childhood to me: she said that she raised herself from a young age, around 12. She said when her parents divorced, they sent her to the USA, to a boarding school. Her parents were very wealthy, and from the sounds of it, she said neither one was very interested in raising her, so they sent her to a boarding school instead.
I have no idea if this is a true story or not, but this is what she told me. I think getting me emotionally connected to her tragic story was also part of her way of hooking me. And for sure, I got hooked. I thought we were friends, but upon reflection, she just used me for various purposes.
She also confided in me all the time about her not having any friends. She seemed upset by this fact, and would bring it up frequently. She also called me up drunk a few times and said, “I love you”. I didn’t know what to think about that, I mostly just thought it was because she was drunk.
She showed zero empathy
When I came to China, Ke Xu put me up in the shittiest motel possible. Part of the wall in my motel room was smashed in, there was water leaking from the ceiling, and giant bug crawled up the bathroom wall while I was there. There was mold-covered towels in the hall and the carpet was dirty.
I gotta say, that night was probably one of the worst nights in my life, because I realized then that Ke Xu was not my friend, and I was most likely just being used. I also got ripped off during the ride to my motel from the airport. No one from the ONO team met me at the airport, and I was scammed into paying 10X the amount by a shady driver. If someone from the team had met me at the airport, this wouldn’t have happened.
I called her up the next day telling her that I could not stay at the motel. Her response was cold, and she asked, “Oh, is the motel too cheap?”. I could tell she didn’t give a shit. Her tone told me everything. She really didn’t have any emotions.
I decided to pick my own place, a really good hotel, NUO, and pay for it myself. To her credit she offered to pay for it, but just didn't get around to it.
NUO was a 5 star hotel, and the best hotel I’ve ever stayed at. Here are some photos of it:
Oddly, I discovered later that night that NUO was where Ke Xu had decided to stay as well, even though she had her own place in Beijing. I had no idea that she was there, and I just picked this hotel based on the photos. She didn’t know I had chosen NUO as well. It was just a weird coincidence.
Anyway, I was willing to forgive her for putting me up in China’s shittiest motel, but there were other indications that perhaps she doesn’t know how to emotionally connect with people.
I became very ill with pneumonia during my first few nights in China, after a party hosted by ONO. The Karaoke night was weird for this reason: Ke Xu basically dominated the mic, singing one song after the other. I found it to be weird, and her singing was pretty bad too. She seemed to lack any kind of self-reflection, or I think she was super drunk at this point. She could drink like a Mafia king, even though she was tiny. I watched her drink tons of hard liquor and still remain coherent.
I made some drawings when I was sick and mind you, this was before the Corona virus. Notice the masks....it's a weird coincidence that I could not breathe (BLM) and I was in China with a terrible pneumonia that filled my lungs with mucuos:
Credit: me, in China at a club after the ONO celebration
Even though I was really sick, Ke Xu insisted that I join her on a live call for ONO stuff. It’s kind of a blur, but I did it. I was having a terrible time breathing, as my lungs were filled with mucous. She did give me some medicine, and then later insist that i go to the hospital, but to be honest, i didn’t want to go to the hospital, I wanted to go home. I was afraid of dying in a Chinese hosptal. Me getting sick there is a different story......So it’s possible that she does have a bit of empathy, I don’t know. I felt a real coldness when around her in person. Well, she was all business. Nothing else seemed to matter to her.
She had a tendency to exaggerate the truth and/or lie.
There were a number of red flags I felt during the time I worked with Ke Xu. One of them involved the number of users of the ONO dapp. She claimed to me on the phone that 3 million users signed up to use ONO. When I asked to get this data, to see it, she replied with vague answers. She was very convincing though, so I had no reason to doubt her.
I was not the only person who thought she might be a sociopath. One of the advisors who was working with Ke Xu had some weird stuff happen with money being owed to her, and Ke not following through. After dealing with Ke for a number of weeks, this advisor told me she thought Ke was a sociopath.
Was ONO an Exit Scam?
photo: At ONO's opening celebration
Yes and no. I think for all the users of the ONO dapp who accumulated the ONOT tokens for their activity, and who couldn’t withdraw their tokens, I think this classifies as an exit scam. The way the ONO team and Ke Xu took zero responsibility and just said the project was on hold, was really shitty. She just fucked over everyone and didn't provide any details about what went wrong.
photo credit: Ke Xu
But ONO had a working product, an actual team (I met the team in person in China), and users. So, I don’t think it was an exit scam, but a failed business, and at the helm, a CEO who is not really suited for running a business. ONO also didn’t allow people to cash out their ONOT tokens, I believe. I quit early on when I got these red flags, so I never used the dapp much at all. I had already quit the team by that point.
Here are photos of the ONO team in China that I took:
The main flaws I detected in Ke Xu were: self-aggrandizement, disregard of people, inability to have empathy, lack of integrity and a tendency to lie and deceive others. To her credit, when I met her, I can honestly say she’s very hard-working, driven, and focused on creating a business. During one of the times I met her for a team lunch, she took like 5 different business calls while we were eating. She was also well-connected to rich investors, and also was in a wealthy class.
Where is Ke Xu Now?
Here’s Ke Xu’s personal Weibo account (Weibo is like Twitter): https://weibo.com/cocoshitty?is_all=1#_rnd1595545761279
A brief visit to Weibo tells us that It appears her next project (possible scam?) will be Cherry:
https://weibo.com/ONOofficial?refer_flag=1001030103_&is_all=1#_rnd1595546998175
Here are some tweets coming from the ONO Weibo account:
ONO所属诺舟集团正式收购Cherry 徐可出任CEO
诺舟集团发布消息称，已于5月16日完成收购未来加密社交网络Cherry，通过此次收购加深诺舟集团在区块链社交领域的布局。诺舟集团董事长、ONO创始人徐可将出任Cherry CEO，原ONO dApp研发团队将与Cherry研发团队完成合并，全力研发基于ONO Chain生态的明星产 展开全文
ONO's Nuozhou Group officially acquires Cherry Xu Ke as CEO
Nuozhou Group announced that it has completed the acquisition of the future encrypted social network Cherry on May 16th. Through this acquisition, it will deepen the layout of Nuozhou Group in the blockchain social field. Xu Ke, chairman of Nuozhou Group and founder of ONO, will serve as Cherry CEO. The original ONO dApp R&D team will merge with the Cherry R&D team to fully develop star products based on the ONO Chain ecology.
Below you will find a number of Weibo tweet that are in both Chinese and English that tell the story of what is being said about ONO from other people. When doing a search for ONO徐可 which is what she went by on Weibo, here comes a bunch of tweets that confirm that ONO went bankrupt:
https://s.weibo.com/weibo?q=ONO%E5%BE%90%E5%8F%AF&Refer=STopic_history
没做成女版孙宇晨，却做成了女版贾跃亭[吃瓜][吃瓜]
曾经风光无限的 ONO 项目目前已经停转。ONO 项目办公场地早已人去楼空，多位高管年后相继离职；包括创始人徐可也“另起炉灶”，重新为新项目站台；此外，ONO 项目自今年 4 月起便不再更新代码，旗下同名 APP 自本月初也已停止服务
Did not make the female version of Justin Sun, but made the female version of Jia Yueting[吃瓜][吃瓜]
The once brilliant ONO project has now been suspended. The office space of the ONO project has long been empty, and many senior executives have left after a year; including the founder Xu Ke also "started from a new start" and rebuilt the new project platform; in addition, the ONO project has no longer updated the code since April this year. The app of the same name has also stopped serving since the beginning of this month
还记得之前大火的徐可ONO吗？如今项目破产了，私募价5厘，现在0.0007元。同样是网红，为何与孙宇晨的差距如此之大？
Remember Xu Ke ONO who was in the fire before? Now the project is bankrupt, the private placement price is 5%, now 0.0007 yuan. It is also an Internet celebrity, why is there such a big gap with Justin Sun?
The fact that ONO went bankrupt (confirmed by others on Weibo) and she still uses the “ONO Ke Xu” title in her Weibo account is really strange. It also shows that she has no remorse about what happened. I’m sure there are investors who lost thousands if not more in ONO. If I had a project that went bankrupt, I would not be using that title in my account name anymore. That’s just weird.
Do I Regret This Experience?
credit: @stellabelle drawing I painted of Ke Xu at the very beginning
Surprisingly, no.
I learned so much about human behavior from this experience. I expanded my understanding about China too. The thing I regret the most is getting other people involved, in the Super Partner program. That still bothers me, because people trusted me, and that trust got abused.
Once I got back from China, I quit ONO and took some time to reflect on it. I didn’t know all the reasons I quit, it was my gut that told me to get away. Because I couldn’t prove with data that Ke lied to me, I didn’t write about the details of me quitting. I found out that when I quit Ke Xu spread a lot of lies about me to others. That showed me that what i suspected was true, she was a person of deceit and someone not to be trusted.
But when I quit ONO, I didn't have any idea that Ke Xu would just vanish and leave everyone hanging. I didn't imagine that the dapp would just go offline like that, with her lying to us all. That was a shocker.
Here's a self-portrait I took at the height of my ONO fever:
(lol: The "In A Good Way" is hilarious now)
I probably left out some details, but this was definitely my shittiest investment ever.
Cheers,
Stellabelle
thanks to @indigoocean who tagged me in her Shittiest Investment blog. This is a genius contest idea and I heard the first one came from @trumpman
I'd like to hear "my most shitty investment ever" stories from @juliakponsford, @yusaymon, @rubenalexander and @rootdraws.
