To know if a project is trustworthy, you have to figure out if there are hidden crypto wallets.
One of the things I want to know is how many tokens the team has kept for itself. This is important because if the team holds 50 percent of the tokens for themselves, they can resell them, making a profit at the expense of investors.
The number of tokens reserved for the team should be small; it cannot represent too large a portion of the entire supply.
Contract scanning tools also search for the percentage of tokens held by owners. They warn the investor with warning signals when this percentage is too high. Investors see the signals and do not invest.
For that reason, some teams create hidden wallets that the contract scanning tools cannot detect.
That is why one of the items I look for is hidden wallets. Such wallets are hidden at the time of token creation, so contract scanning tools cannot detect them.
In this article, we are going to hunt for hidden wallets.
1) Performing research with automatic tools
Let’s start with a simple search. We will use a popular online contract analysis tool. Among many pieces of information, that tool also scans the biggest wallets. It alerts us if a wallet holds too high a percentage of supply.
Let’s proceed!
Apparently, Bscheck did not find any anomalies.
It identified five large wallets that hold significant percentages of the supply. It is common for a wallet to have 2 percent of the entire market cap when we talk about small caps. Above 5 percent, the tool would cause a warning signal to appear. In this case, however, the amount of supply held by the wallets is within tolerable margins.
Everything seems fine, and we can invest in the token.
But the smart investor is not easily fooled. The wise investor proceeds with further manual research.
2) Don’t trust the bots. Search for hidden wallets manually
This tool failed to locate the 60 wallets worth $2,000 each created by the project owners.
How do we locate them? Well, it is not easy to find them because they are hidden wallets created explicitly by the owners.
The secret to finding them is looking for wallets with round figures without decimal places.
By browsing through the list of holders, we found wallet number 18, which has some anomalies. It is different from other wallets; the number of tokens it holds is expressed without decimals. This is quite uncommon.
Here is the difference between wallet number 18 and wallet number 19:
Wallet 18: 5,024,246,973,674336183660556127 (regular)
Wallet 19: 4,943,750,000 (anomaly)
Wallet 19 does not have a long tail of decimal numbers typical of crypto transactions. This is why we can make an inference. Once they deployed the contract, the project owners also created wallet 19.
It has an excessively round number of tokens. The owners created it. Luck is on our side. If we look at the other wallets, we realize that there is a whole list of wallets with that exact figure. These wallets were artificially created when the project owners deployed the contract.
Just click on one of these wallets to gather further confirmation of our hypothesis.
3) Follow the footsteps of the hidden wallet
By clicking on wallet 19, we land on its page and notice that the first entry of incoming tokens corresponds with a “bulk” sending of tokens at the time of contract deployment (bulksend token simple). It also tells us that the token sending comes from Kyublii deployer (the token name).
Perfect, we no longer have any doubts. The owners have created hidden wallets so that investors cannot notice the amount of supply secretly held by the team.
Now let’s try to understand the extent of the phenomenon. How much supply did the team hold for itself, escaping the control of the bots?
Let’s click on the transaction code (Txn Hash). In that transaction, we will see all the wallets that received tokens after the contract deployment.
Here is the list of 60 wallets that received tokens. Some of them have a current value of $2200 each.
These 60 wallets hold about 20 percent of the supply. This is a huge amount. This figure would undoubtedly have alerted any contract scanning tool. But with this operation, the team hid its footprints.
They could have hidden them better.
In theory, you can click on each of these wallets to see if they sold portions of tokens at the end of the presale to make cash at the expense of investors.
Conclusions
Since the spread of contract scanning tools, hidden wallets have become increasingly common.
The only reason for this practice is to allow the team to escape scrutiny and to have greater firepower than small investors.
But we have seen that with a manual search, one can detect hidden wallets and make more rational decisions.
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