The Admin of Dread Hugbunter has made an announcement stating that the Abacus market is now gone with many users losing their funds still stuck in the market escrow system.

“Gone”, I can’t put a label on this one but I am more than convinced Abacus isn’t coming back.

Its up in the air what the truth is on this one, I am mostly inclined to an exit scam, based on funds being locked up for a whole day before everything went offline. At the point the servers went down, it matched the same time that Admin went offline on Jabber. There was also a post showing that around 220k moved out of the hot wallet where all deposits were directed to on that day. However, this hot wallet was not the original Abacus hot wallet. When the deposits and withdrawals stopped being processed this wallet was a newly placed hot wallet to take in funds. On June 28th, over 320k was moved out of the existing Abacus hot wallet, on June 29th, Vito had been in contact with me, frustrated that his Daunt links were not syncing to the clearnet site. The frustration from him is not behavior I have ever witnessed from him either. Alone, this either describes an exit scam, where he tried to hide the funds moving on the 28th by switching the hot wallet, or potentially this was a hack and these funds were stolen and so the hot wallet was moved afterwards for whatever reason.

With the hack theory, this is NOT a lot of money compared to what I assume Vito has earned over the years and I can disclose that unknown to many, Abacus also had around 60-100k stolen (I can’t remember the figure, but these numbers stick out as being in the right range) 2 or 3 years ago, due to a withdrawal exploit. He covered the losses and didn’t take commission for a while as to repay everything into the market. He immediately told me of this and asked for advice on the situation and made it right, which did instill some form of trust for me going forward too. If this was the case now, I do believe he would have reached out. I think this is something that also points more to an exit scam, or it could simply be both hack -> exit scam.

The remaining theory while paranoia is still high from the Arch bust, is that this is a seizure. I have been ignoring this as a possibility due to being confident that, when he contacted me following the post made to the Abacus sub, it was definitely him I was communicating with. While not out of the realms of possibility that he was under a LE handler, I just don’t think it makes sense for this. The only reason I am bringing this up is that both Byte and Sonny (Abacus Mods) are MIA. This could also be that they are simply complicit in an exit scam. The movement of funds is another reason I don’t believe it to be LE behind this, from what I saw a lot of this was sporadic with another 7k moving out of one of the hot wallets after the other large transactions.

The only other things I am questioning now is, why return to make a post? How is it that my comment on that post baited him out onto Jabber so quickly and with such fury? His anger towards me following that comment was unbelievable, definitely not what I expected of him. He told me he would have the site up and running by now and has since been offline for over 31 hours. Maybe he did intend to get the market up and running, maybe he still does. But as of right now, while I still hope as always that this is wrong, I do not believe Abacus will return.

What a crazy few months we’re having, following such a long quiet period.
Stay safe everyone.