HEX is dead—will it go down as the largest Ponzi scheme in digital currency history?

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Not long ago, Richard Schueler, aka Richard Heart, was on top of the world. Having launched and begun promoting HEX, marketed as the world’s first blockchain Certificate of Deposit in 2018, Heart regularly boasted on social media about his million-dollar shopping sprees and all the fancy things he had acquired.

Now, HEX is dead, and Heart is facing multiple charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including conducting unregistered securities offerings and fraud. While the former is linked to his offering and promoting HEX, PulseChain, and PulseX, the latter is linked to his alleged misappropriation of at least $12 million in investor funds to purchase luxury goods.

Included in his crime-fueled shopping spree were high-end watches, sports cars, and a 555-carat black diamond known as ‘The Enigma.’ Heart had previously boasted about owning the world’s largest black diamond in his X (formerly Twitter) bio, but he quickly removed all reference to it, as well as the aforementioned tokens, when rumors began that the SEC was asking questions.

CoinGeek warned everyone about Heart and HEX for years

$HEX has now had over a 99% drawdown from the top, in one of the most impressive ponzi scheme collapses in the history of finance.

At its peak, $HEX marketcap was worth over $50 billion dollars. I think more people need to talk about how insane this was pic.twitter.com/kx4maythuV

— Jack (@depression2019) August 5, 2023

Just as we did with FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried, CoinGeek warned would-be investors about Heart long ago.

Heart was sued for violating anti-spam laws in Washington State in the early days of the internet. He has also been linked to some murky dealings, including blackmail, robbery, and corruption, in Panama, although it must be said that no charges were brought against him for these matters.

In 2020, CoinGeek amplified concerns about suspicious transactions related to HEX. Heart took to social media to call the concerns “stupid” and dismiss them.

Now, HEX has crashed and burned, diving from a $50 billion peak to less than 10% of that today, and HEXicans are in disarray as the wealth they thought they had accumulated evaporates in real time.

Why are all of Dr. Craig Wright’s biggest enemies con men?

Heart is known as one of Dr. Craig Wright‘s biggest detractors. For years, he has attacked Dr. Wright every chance he got, and he even heckled him off stage once, claiming he was lying about being Bitcoin’s inventor.

Yet, since then, Heart has been charged with fraud (with a lot more coming), and Dr. Wright has racked up a huge blockchain intellectual property portfolio as well as several impressive legal victories in his quest to prove in court that he is, indeed, Bitcoin’s inventor.

Isn’t it funny how the loudest enemies of Dr. Wright, such as Heart, Monero’s Ricardo Spagni, and Binance founder Changpoeng Zhao, have all found themselves on the wrong side of the law while Dr. Wright has won every court case to date?

Of course, regular CoinGeek readers will know why this is so: Dr. Wright is who he says he is, and those calling him a scammer know that what he represents is the end of their easy-money schemes and the beginning of something new: true blockchain utility.

Richard Heart and his various projects are done. The rest of Dr. Wright and Bitcoin’s enemies will follow.

Follow CoinGeek’s Crypto Crime Cartel series, which delves into the stream of group—from BitMEX to Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ShapeShift, Coinbase, Ripple,
Ethereum, FTX and Tether—who have co-opted the digital asset revolution and turned the industry into a minefield for naïve (and even experienced) players in the market.