I've recently came across that post on medium, and it triggered me to start this topic.
https://medium.com/@douglaslyons/ldj-capital-all-that-glitters-is-not-gold-ccbfc21ffd71
I do not want to take any emotions or allegations from there ,but I rather want to discuss facts and find the truth.
Long story short:
Douglas Lyons did some digging in public domain and found out, that none of LDG Capital's offices (listed at the LDJ Capital website) has any noticeable presence of LDG and has are all in co-workings or residential areas. Which is more than strange and simply inadequate for a company, which claims to work with 1.5 trillion dollars worth of capital sources.
He learned, that some team members of LDJ look fake and even sometimes simply are very likely "ghosts" or fake accounts.
Initially one startup, and later on several 10s more told Douglas, that LDJ Capital and David Drake in particular set up meetings with them at their expense and brought random people (someone from the street for $50/hour, as it is claimed there) just to charge ICOs for their time. Most of such meeting had no result other than somewhat $30k of startup funds spent. There are more ICO advisors in the LinkedIn discussion coming out and telling the same stories about allegedly con actions or attempts for such actions of LDJ team in regard of their ICOs. Link to that thread: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6397806831632154624/
He also found out, that personal assets of David Drake (the Chairman of LDJ) are very modest at best, and the lavish lifestyle, which he claims to have, is more likely a glitter, rather than a product or confirmation of the high status.
There are also a suggestion, that David Drake is onboarding with each and every ICO, which is willing to pay him anything in tokens, and that he is promoting himself, as the #1 top adviser at the ICOBench. Which he technically is, since he has a lot of mostly low quality project, which he couldn't really advise even being the smartest person on the earth: just counting projects listed at ICOBench, there 75 running. Taking David spends no time on anything other than ICO advisory, it would left him with 32 minutes per project per 1 normal week of working, which is not enough even to properly read and analyse an average White Paper of 45 pages (my rough estimation). What kind of Advisor is that?!
I want to find a logical explanation for what is happening and determine, if it is actually a fraud, or a super aggressive hustling and a rapidly growing business with all the corresponding deficiencies and flaws (I want to leave it a chance, since LDJ going down would hurt a lot of relatively innocent ICOs and the industry as a whole in a short span of time [yet it will clear it and make stronger, if LDJ actually is a fraud]). What do you think?
I want tot ask everyone to stick to a professional manner of speaking and try to be reasonable and to do justice to the company in question. This is actually a very serious matter and we have to be careful discussing it.
Also, I want to discuss consequences of both scenarios. Since, as a community, our goal is to build a stronger and more valuable ecosystem, we all may benefit from discussion of a strategy on how to hold this particular issue and issues of the close kind in the future.
This is a report from from an interesting post on BitcoinTalk.