The Case for $JHOLOW

Welcome to Whale Hunting, a weekly newsletter and podcast delving into the hidden worlds of wealth and power from the team at Project Brazen. For more of Project Brazen's work – including the Tribeca-selected podcast Spy Valley, and Fur & Loathing, the bizarre story of an unsolved US chemical weapons attack – visit brazen.fm. 

For years, I've searched for a way to use the technology of cryptocurrency to do something maverick and extraordinary.

At Brazen, we considered developing an NFT project inspired by our "Rich List," where every digital playing card of the world's secret billionaires had a real-time feed of what was going on with that particular character. We wondered if we could crowdsource investigations using a DAO or launch new podcast and film projects by "tokenizing" the ownership. But nothing felt quite right until I saw the wild energy in the meme coin market over the last year (everything $CHILLGUY to $GOAT to $TRUMP).

At Brazen, we aren't interested in meme coins as an investment – but we are interested in how do throw up a sail to use its speculative winds to achieve unexpected outcomes with real-world impacts.

That's why we introduced last week the $JHOLOW project. Many months ago, a random person went onto the platform Pump Fun to create a memcoin called $JHOLOW – they spent no money doing so and abandoned it soon after. Every week, tens of thousands of such coins are created on the Solana blockchain. A precious few of them capture the attention of crypto markets and rise in value precipitously before crashing down in a sudden market-wide exit. For this reason, I advocate never to invest in meme coins believing you'll understand those dynamics – you will usually be slower and lose money. At best, you're lucky or in the know.

But what's interesting to me is how to hijack such a project, allow speculators to jump in because of interest in the attention around the mission and then use that to cause completely unexpected, good outcomes. That's what's going on here. Together with some other crypto enthusiasts we essentially took over the external visuals of the $JHOLOW coin and redirected interested parties to our project to track Jho Low down and find the missing money https://whereisjho.xyz.

Our unconventional twist is that if a tipster sends us something truly new about Jho – whether a never-before-published picture, a document, a recording, a video, a really tangible lead - they will be paid a "bounty" in $JHOLOW meme coins by members of the take-over group. Those meme coins are directly tradable for fiat currency, so it's a genuine bounty. The more attention the project garners from people, including small investors, media, people watching from the sidelines and cheering and crypto speculators, the more the price of $JHOLOW rises – and the more valuable a tip bounty becomes.

The goal of this project, in other words, is to use crypto mania to track down Jho Low, learn new things, maybe even find clues as to where he hid the missing billions. To enjoy $JHOLOW, you don't have to get involved in crypto at all - you can just follow along on X, join our Discord channel, or Telegram, or just check in on https://whereisjho.xyz. For those who want to buy a few of the coins for fun, here is the contract address: 8iokxpQzJ5RqqCCV7xrRtHTywQwd6AkSV1pdPutUMCpZ

We already received a great first tip (only small because it's a bit old):

The tipster received nearly $1,500 worth of $JHOLOW, which they are free to hold onto or sell off immediately. We're really hopeful this helps us get a true break-through (even bigger than the time that a member of the public sent in a picture of Jho at Disneyland Shanghai!).

To really get into the philosophy and reasoning, check out the White Paper here or download the PDF:

Please spread the word, find tips (you can email anonymously at whereisjho@pm.me or let us know what you think!

Got a question or a tip for us? Get in touch at whalehunting@projectbrazen.com. You can also contact us securely here.

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