Two New and Questionable Cardano Projects: Part 2 Digirack

If you missed Part 1 of this duo of articles we suggest you click here to go back and at least read the introduction to it as it pertains to the team member, Denis Lukavackic, of both Digirack and Cardalonia who piqued our interest in them.

This article is a summary of our investigations into the recently submitted project to Built on Cardano, DigiRack: a proposed NFT marketplace for Cardano. This platform seemed quite legitimate at a first glance, however, a deeper investigation threw up some red flags and we are authoring this piece to bring our finding to your attention.

If the below is TLDR for you then our friends at SCATDAO did a DYOR report on Digirack using their DYOR Tool and you can find the results of that here. And if that’s too much to handle then you can just know that their results came in at 23.33%; very negative.

Digirack

Token Sale with no Product

The materials produced by Digirack say that they have been working on this project for “about 7 months”, and decided to launch after developing the MVP. There is no MVP available for users, just 4 screenshots and an auto scrolling repeating screen (Like a GIF), that is also one of the screenshots, with a generic voiceover. The statement that the development of an MVP preceded the launch of the Digirack website and token sale is proven false by their own actions.

Website Claims

The above claim is made in the FAQ section of their website but we are first going to touch on the “In The News” section where they have listed the logos of four companies who have, apparently, featured the project.

investing.com - A search on the website investing.com for Digirack turns up no results. So investing.com doesn’t seem to have produced any content on Digirack.

CoinMarketCap - There are no results when searching for DigiRack on CoinMarketCap’s knowledge platform, or when searching for their RACK token on the platform.

CoinTelegraph - There are also no results when [searching DigiRack on CoinTelegraph](https://cointelegraph.com/search?query=digirack].

Yahoo Finance - Yahoo finance does in fact have a piece about Digirack. This is a repost of a Global Newswire press release, a paid service who’s releases are often picked up and reposted by Yahoo Finance. Because of this Yahoo Finance is not (by us and many others in the space) deemed as a reliable source of verification for any project as projects can pay to have themselves featured there.

In the FAQ section, alongside their MVP claims, is the claim that their unique selling points are “never before seen” features. These are, in fact, present on existing NFT marketplaces and protocols: personalized creator profiles (on Artano), On-Chain minting with metadata (multiple marketplaces, such as Tokhun), and NFT staking (multiple platforms, such as Paribus). These claims are simply not true and are misleading.

Finally, in the footer of the website are what look like links to a Terms and Conditions and a Privacy Policy, however neither actually links to anything.

The Team

The team mentioned on the Digirack page goes as follows:

The Founder and CEO - On his Linkedin (only a few connections and no activity for 2 years) and Twitter (which was created in April 2022 and has over 900 followers, a pair of facts that stinks of paid for followers) he states that he works for FinTech Programmers. He is not listed on their site amongst their team members but upon contacting FinTech Programmers via Telegram they said that he had worked for them for 5 years. However, on his Linkedin, he only says that he’s worked there for a year, how is there such a HUGE discrepancy here?

Co-Founder - One of the other co-founder has a Linkedin account that contains nothing except a profile picture and 2 years of education. Nothing that can be used to verify the individual in the slightest.

The other two members of the team, Denis Lukavackic and Piyanut Wonglakhon, were delved into at the beginning of Part 1 of this duo of articles and it is Denis that linked these two projects together and piqued our interest into their legitimacy. Denis is listed as a co-founder and Piyanut as CSO.

This team includes no smart contract developers for Cardano and all the points listed here, and in our previous article, make the team’s existence and legitimacy seem quite questionable, bringing the whole project’s legitimacy into question. To note, in this article, we are told that “there are a dozen other Developers that major in specific programming languages like Vue, Node JS, Haskell who are behind the scenes developing and building out the platform.” This article is itself quite an interesting one, so let’s move onto their blog content.

Blog Content

Reading through their blog we are presented with the sort of content we may expect from a project introducing itself to the world. However a few articles are worth mentioning:

A Strange One - DigiRack released an article (the one mentioned above) introducing their Founder and CEO, Shirajuddin M. This article repurposes his Twitter bio, and makes numerous claims that can’t be confirmed through his Twitter or Linkedin, specifically one about him founding numerous startups. It also uses the same photo of him seen in all other materials, including his Linkedin and Twitter profiles.

What is strangest about this article is that after just 3 sentences about the CEO the article pivots to tell us that there are “a dozen other Developers” working on the project. It then features a quote from DigiRack’s co-founder, about the “exploding NFT” market, but nothing about the CEO. So no quotes from the CEO that you’re introducing, and nothing really verifiable about him. Hmmm….

Some Plagiarism - After reading their blog content we checked some of their posts for plagiarism. There was some level of plagiarism in some of the more generic ones however this is the one that we want to bring to your attention. Compare the “Why Are NFTs So Valuable?” section of the DigiRack article and this one from Art Deco. Too many similarities to really be a coincidence.

Art Deco was a NFT marketplace on Binance Smart Chain last year that seemed to have been an exit-scam. All of their contacts and socials went dead last year and their website is gone. If you’re going to plagiarize something, why would you choose to do it from a project that was a seemingly obvious exit scam?

Litepaper

The DigiRack litepaper has enough information to pass as a decent litepaper. However there is one MASSIVE error in it. The team listed in the litepaper does NOT contain the founder Shirajuddin M, as is listed on the website. Instead it lists Damir and Denis as Co-Founders and Piyanut as CSO. It then lists a 4th persona, Joe Paryse, with Bart Simpson as their picture, as Project Manager. This discrepancy between the litepaper (released March 31st) and the website is a huge red flag, how can you forget your Founder and CEO in your litepaper? I mean, did he not read it before release?

Social Media Following

The Digirack Twitter has been live for 2 months and has already gained over 6000 followers. This smells of followers being bought, and this idea is backed up by the lack of interaction on almost every post they’ve made.
 Their Telegram has around 2000 followers, but not much activity at all. Their Medium account has a humongous amount of followers for a Medium account with over 2500. Having such a large amount of followers for a Medium blog is very strange and this is a similarity between Digirack and Cardalonia. It is very rare for a project’s blog to have this many followers, as we showed in Part 1 and this, again, stinks of Digirack having paid for followers.

In Conclusion

After reviewing the materials, claims, and content from Digirack and Cardalonia we are not convinced by the legitimacy of either project. We encourage you to do your own research, DYOR, before making any decisions and not to take our word as gospel; the same as we would tell you not to take anyone else’s word as gospel.

We would love to have the Digirack founder, Shirajuddin, reach out to us for a public discussion on this project. Our friends at SCATDAO reached out to him regarding some of the discrepancies in the project and his materials but so far have had no response. More than that we’d love to get a response from Denis Lukavackic and have him come on a public chat to discuss these two projects with us. Shirajuddin and Denis, are either of you out there?

As always, stay safe out there Cardano 🦆