Ruja was pacing up and down backstage. I will double your coins. I will double your coins.
Three thousand people were waiting for her. Most of them were investors like Christine Grablis or Layla Begum: ordinary people who’d gradually become more involved in OneCoin and wanted to hear the top leaders and meet fellow “coiners.” Wembley Arena, London’s premiere indoor venue, was better known for hosting world-famous bands. But demand for the “CoinRush” event had been off the charts, even at €200 a ticket. Several Chinese members were supposed to be attending the event but they had their visas rejected by the UK’s Home Office. It cost OneCoin at least half a million Euros to put this corporate event on, but they’d make the money back in new sales. Ruja and some of the other top people stayed in London between her birthday party and the London event, mostly working from the RavenR Capital office in Knightsbridge. As usual, the night before the event there was an expensive dinner for the top promoters in central London, most of whom stayed at the Hilton in Kensington.
The purpose of CoinRush was the same as the Dubai and Macao corporates: re-energize the network and send promoters back out with fresh determination. From midday, the stars of the network went onstage to share their stories or give motivational speeches. Hype-man Kari Wahlroos charged around the stage like a madman, screaming that everyone could get rich. The New Zealand MLM expert Ed Ludbrook, who prided himself on being more buttoned up than the average MLMer, said he’d “never seen anything like this.” Chris Principe from Financial IT Magazine opened with a little in-joke: Last year there was a 37 percent decrease in people robbing banks… but a 100 percent increase in the banks robbing people. Many OneCoin investors had become keen students of finance, reading up on how the banks could print money and then make interest on it, and so this joke went down well. Kari Wahlroos, dressed in a sharp blue suit, announced that OneCoin had created 320 millionaires via sales commissions and a further 2,500 via the OneCoin they owned. There was the same quasi-religious feel as in Macau: the faithful walked around wearing OneCoin medallions and making the special OneCoin hand gesture at each other.
Online critics, especially from the ever-vigilant website BehindMLM, were watching closely. Following the first article about OneCoin back in 2014, Oz, the founder of BehindMLM, had continued to monitor the company, often publishing several critical articles each month about the firm’s unusually fast growth and hyped-up promises. His work had picked up a following and by 2016 an informal community of armchair detectives had coalesced around the site, where they started to share insights or titbits they’d dug up online. Some of this crew had even managed to get a couple of OneCoin events closed down in the US in 2015 by contacting the venues where meetings were scheduled to take place—alleging that the education “products” were just a cover, and that no one knew how the price of the coin was really set. They tried to alert Wembley Arena staff about the big London corporate event in the hope that might get cancelled too: “Please do what you can to stop the event!” begged one on the forum. Several BehindMLM contributors even phoned the venue to ask about it—but the staff were tight-lipped. “I hope no one’s expecting British Bobbies to turn up and start arresting people,” said one disappointed contributor just hours before the event was due to start. “This is twenty-first-century laissez-faire Britain, not the movies.”
He was right—there were no bobbies and no arrests. In fact, the mood backstage was jubilant. The recently added “Infinity Trader” package—at €25,000 the largest the company sold, along with fresh educational materials—was doing a fine trade. A 10 percent price hike in April had lifted profits without hurting growth, and the value of a single OneCoin had just increased again to €5.95. But Ruja was unusually nervous because of the controversial announcement she was about to make. She was going to launch a brand-new blockchain.
Changing blockchains went against everything Ruja had said about the importance of having a fixed-supply currency. For three years, she’d evangelized about the power of a fixed-supply money that couldn’t be tampered with—back in Malaysia with Sebastian in 2014 she even said, “I cannot print more… even if I think, oh this network is growing so fast let’s make five billion now… it’s impossible.” No other cryptocurrency company had ever tried anything like this before. And now she had to tell the audience she was ripping it all up and starting again.
In truth, she had little choice. OneCoin’s popularity had taken everyone by surprise, including Ruja. When she’d designed the technology back in July 2014, she assumed that 2.1 billion coins would last a lifetime. But growth had been so fast that, even though OneCoin was barely 18 months old, they were running out of coins. And because OneCoin was sold via MLM, no more coins meant no more packages for promoters like Igor to sell, and everything would grind to a halt.
Ruja’s solution to this coin shortage was to move everything on to a bigger and faster blockchain. The new blockchain would comprise 120 billion coins—50 times more than the original. And it would create them much faster too, increasing from 10,000 new coins per ten minutes to 50,000 a minute.
Any investor with an ounce of financial acumen could spot the problem. Economics 101 states that an increase in supply results in a reduction in value. Increasing the supply of OneCoin by a factor of 50 overnight should, all else being equal, result in a catastrophic collapse in the value of investors’ coins. That was why Ruja planned to make an audacious promise too: when the new blockchain is launched on October 1, 2016, the price would remain exactly the same and everyone’s coins would be immediately doubled. The whole plan strained credibility.
Sebastian called Ruja onstage: “Please give a warm welcome for our creator, our founder…”
“This Girl Is on Fire” by Alicia Keys blasted over Wembley Arena’s sound system and pyrotechnics lit up the stage. Wearing a flowing red gown and deep-red lipstick, Ruja strode out confidently in front of the giant logo which said, “OneCoin: The Bitcoin Killer.” She bowed, paused, smiled, looked out at the vast audience and milked the applause. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it. From Hong Kong to Helsinki, to Singapore with Sebastian on the first ever tour, to Dubai, to Macau and now London, Dr. Ruja had finally become a good performer.
After praising the OneCoin network as “global citizens wanting to make a change,” and promising that the coin would soon go public on a currency exchange, it was time to make the announcement. She had speech prompts on the stage floor monitor, but she barely looked at them. She had practiced this moment for six months.
“Now I think it’s time,” Ruja told the crowd, with carefully controlled gaps between each sentence, timed for applause, “do or do not. We want to be the number one cryptocurrency out there…” There was no doubt, no hesitation. As for Bitcoin? It was far too slow, far too technical.
“Can we become the biggest cryptocurrency in the world with what we have now…?”
“Yes!” shouted a promoter from row Z.
“No. We cannot.” She explained that OneCoin had run out of coins. There wasn’t enough to go around, which left only one option: “[We will] create a bigger coin than anyone… we will go up to one hundred and twenty billion coins.” There was only one snag of course. That needed a new blockchain. “We will launch a new blockchain on the first of October.”
Ruja now slowed down. She needed to ensure the crowd was on her side. “For you, as existing members, people who supported us in phase one… we as a company will double the coins in your account.”
The crowd roared. They were still cheering as Ruja hastened to add, “This will only happen only once in OneCoin history. Never again.”
“We love you, Ruja,” someone shouted.
“Thank you,” she replied. “In two years, nobody will talk about Bitcoin any more.”
Within minutes, Oz and the BehindMLM investigators found a video of Ruja’s speech on YouTube and watched it with horror. “A OneCoin pumper I follow on Facebook proclaimed today that he just became a millionaire. He said he was trembling with excitement,” wrote one. Tim Tayshun, a regular contributor, couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “Ruja is so amazing she bends entire mathematical principles,” he wrote. He was being facetious, of course. But most people in the London audience believed exactly that.