Once upon a time….
When you had been scammed in crypto, your money was gone forever.
On October 8th 2020 12:17:50 AM +UTC PARSIQ’s new PRQ token contract launched. In it, ERC-20 code that would change the landscape of scams and exchange hacks forever for the Parsiq community.
Governance was added.
First use of the new protocol
On November the 22nd 2020, an elaborate scam attempt was deployed against the PARSIQ community, where an already populated telegram group, posing as the real PARSIQ community group, added users from the real PARSIQ community (click here for guide on how to avoid that), with the intention of scamming them, by promising an airdrop if they deposited x amount of PRQ into their wallet.
Fortunately most of the PARSIQ community flagged this as a scam right away and the telegram group was quickly shut down. They didn’t stop with just the telegram group, they also created several false websites to make the scam seem even more legit. Fortunately we reached out to the registrars of these websites and had them shut down immediately.
We thought the threat to the community had been contained and eradicated before any harm was caused, but one poor soul unfortunately had thought this was another legit airdrop from PARSIQ, as we just 3 weeks prior, had done the PRQBOOST token airdrop for PRQ holders (read more here)
Even though governance was added to the contract, there hasn’t been time to properly implement the system for the community to use it as intended.
A dilemma arose. Should we use the governance tools to save the PRQ of just one user and what would that mean for the rest of the community? Would some be scared that this level of power, was in the hands of the team and not the community? Would people try to abuse our gesture of goodwill?
Before beginning discussions, a 1 day “review” was placed on the scammers wallet, effectively freezing the assets in place, so the bad actors at least couldn’t sell or transfer the tokens while we discussed the situation.
After some back and forth, the team unanimously agreed that we will always try to help our community when it is proper for us to do so, whether it’s 1 user or 100 or 10.000, we will always try to help our community. A decision was made to place a “decision period” on the wallet, while we drafted this statement to go along with the user receiving his funds back from the scammer’s wallet.
At the time of writing, the user has been refunded his tokens and has been informed of the Governed transfer back to his wallet.
The Governance Board
Although The Governance Board is not yet in place, we hope that you, our community, trust us enough to carry out sentencing in very clear-cut cases of fraud and theft.
With that being said, the case here was clear. It is in no way our intention to enter into disputes, where there isn’t clear documentation of theft or fraud. This is only meant to be used in emergency situations.
The board is planned for launch in 2021(a more specific date will be announced later), with the opportunity for all PRQ holders to participate in voting for different proposals.
What is Governance?
The feature set varies, depending what is implemented in the contract. In essence, it’s a way of making decisions. Decisions whether to do or not to do something proposed by someone.
For PARSIQ, the governance implemented is very straight forward, but also subject to change as needs arises — and before it’s finally implemented as intended, there will be a list of features enabled for the community to use.
A clear message for scammers
We will not tolerate any attacks on our community or attempts of defrauding them their PRQ and we will go that extra mile to help them out. Whether it be an exchange where PRQ is traded that’s hacked or an outright scam targeted towards our community, we will always try to do right by our community and keep users PRQ safe.
