Through various shell companies and other structures, the core Finixio team owns multiple memecoins, and these coins are woven into their marketing and gambling operations.
We already talked in the first episode of this series about vertical and horizontal integration — owning production, distribution, and marketing means you’re getting paid every step of the way. It’s more efficient and streamlined.
If you would rather listen to this article, you can do so below.
Or, you can read a 500 word summary courtesy of ChatGPT.
But the other approach to business integration isn’t to own the movie theaters, the movie studios, and the movie magazines, like Hollywood used to.
It’s to start with a product that does one thing, then add functionality until you’re selling an ‘everything’ product or service. It started out as a restaurant, then we built a cocktail bar on the side and a nightclub in the basement and a hotel on the top floor. There’s a gym and a helipad and a nail bar and a shopping mall. You can stay here for days and never want to leave, and everything you do makes us money.
The Finixio team do this too. The easiest way to see the whole thing in operation is through 99 Bitcoins, where all these elements come together in an unusually clear way.
99 Bitcoins videos are often linked to in articles on Finixio team-controlled marketing websites, and it’s a marketing channel in its own right for the Finixio/Clickout teams gambing and crypto operations. It also has its own memecoin.
It does it all.
And as an authoritative Youtube channel it’s crucial in supporting their search and promotional efforts. I believe there is convincing evidence that the Finixio team now directly controls the channel and its associated assets, including its crypto coin.
The story of how it works, and how we got here, is basically the same as everything else the Finixio team does, except more so.
99 Bitcoins used to be a respectable crypto news outlet, one of the few with enough contact with the industry to effectively report on it and enough distance to do so in a way that let ordinary people understand it. In fact, that was the company’s whole offering. It put it in a great position in the market: if you were in the know, the news was useful, and if you weren’t there was enough explanation that you could figure it out.
But it’s not like that now.
99 Bitcoins changes hands. Who owns it now?
In March 2024, 99 Bitcoins changed hands. Onetime owner Ofir Beigel announced the sale on his LinkedIn without stating who the buyer was:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ofirbeigel/
Shortly thereafter, a press release went into (very slightly) more detail:
That’s not how it usually goes when a longstanding business gets acquired. Normally, everyone takes the opportunity to get a quote and a free moment of attention from the press.
Most press releases about a company being bought feature enthusiastic comments from someone in the C suite at the purchaser and the purchasee, carefully planned and curated with their internal comms teams.
No-one is modest about this, it is a self-promotion opportunity for everyone involved and everyone who has ever been in one or drafted one knows very clearly how the game is played. You’re giving industry journalists the quotes you want them to put in their articles when they cover the sale; the vast majority of such quotes come ultimately from press releases carefully constructed and vetted from inside companies.
Yet in this instance, there is a deafening silence at the centre of the press release.
It looks kind of like they’re trying to conceal who the new owners are. The quote from 99 Bitcoins comes from its newly appointed editor — not from the old owners, or the new owners.
The owners and the team
In a now-deleted LinkedIn post we were able to source from archive.org, financial journalist Rachel Wolcott says she can confirm that Finixio devolved their crypto businesses to ClickOut Media.
So far, so good. The connection between Finixio and Clickout Media is well established. In part one of this series, we showed that Finixio’s core team owns and operates Clickout Media through UK-based shell companies.
Does Clickout own 99Bitcoins?
Maybe.
And maybe they’re hiring staff for the site for, you know, unrelated reasons.
This job advert, now scrubbed, was supplied to me by a source.
We can’t say for definite — there’s no screenshot of an ownership record I can show you. And in their privacy policy, often a solid source for mumbled confessions about who’s ultimately legally responsible for a business…
https://99bitcoins.com/ -policy/
It’s this kind of stuff again.
Where is 99 Bitcoins? Who is Daniel K Morgan?
Ostensibly 99 Bitcoins is ‘a legit business owned by Daniel K Morgan and registered in the Marshall Islands.’ But we weren’t able to find a company called 99 Bitcoins in the Marshall Islands company register.
We weren’t able to track down Daniel K Morgan either, and despite a date of birth and a potted bio being listed on the 99 Bitcoins website…
https://99bitcoins.com/ /daniel-morgan/
… there’s no photo, he doesn’t seem to be on LinkedIn, and we couldn’t track him down anywhere else either.
https://theorg.com/org/ /org-chart/daniel
Nope.
I’ve checked the obvious suspects (LinkedIn, Twitter, web searches and business contact site searches), and found plenty of people with the same name, but they’re photographers, artists, and various other things — obviously not our guy. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t have a digital footprint at all, which is very weird for anyone who works in tech.
The editor who gave a quote to their press release, on the other hand, is Sam Cooling, and he does exist:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelcooling/
He switched over to 99 Bitcoins’ editorship after a year as a journalist for Clickout Media.
Sure enough, he’s an author at CryptoNews:
https://cryptonews.com/editors/sam-cooling/
Where Adam Grunwerg is on the board:
crunchbase.com/person/adam-grunwerg-6ad4
And at Business2Community:
https://www.business2community.com/author/samcooling
And at Techopedia:
https://www.techopedia.com/contributors/samcooling
All sites that we know are owned or operated by the Clickout Media/Finixio team.
The nearest thing we have to real evidence about who actually owns 99 Bitcoins is Clickout Media hiring a new editor direct from their extant talent pool, which strongly indicates that they’re involved. At the very least, they’re a client:
Check out which other companies are listed here. Base Dawg, Lucky Block, Mega Dice… put a pin in these, we will be back to them in a later part of this series. And later on we’ll get into how being a ‘client’ of Clickout can mean something different than it usually does.)
99 Bitcoins has a LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/99-coins-ltd/
That lists the actual business entity as 99 Coins Ltd, and the address as ‘Sarasota, Florida.’ (We checked for 99 Coins in the Marshall Islands database too, for the sake of completeness, and still came up with nothing.)
Doing a bit more digging, we were able to get a full street address for the Florida location:
https://www.zoominfo.com/c/99bitcoins/359278333
(Check out what kind of organization they’re listed as!)
That’s 4283 Express Ln 016 355 Sarasota, FL 34249, USA. It’s confirmed by this email marketing company too. However, 99 Coins doesn’t actually appear on the Florida business registry:
Neither does 99 Bitcoins.
And the business address returns nothing too. When we checked the business address directly, on Google Maps, it turns out to be a food warehouse:
Is 99 Bitcoins sandwiched in between Albert’s Fresh Produce and United Natural Foods Inc? Seems unlikely.
I went so far as to check Street View. Perhaps I’m missing something.
Maybe they’re in one of those trucks.
It’s possible this building was once something else, but it’s not likely. This is a warehouse, not a shopping mall, so it’s not likely that they’re registered to a defunct lawyer’s office that once stood between a nail place and a Wendy’s or something.
Their Youtube channel is similarly uninformative:
https://www.youtube.com/@99Bitcoins
All the evidence we have suggests that whatever the specific nature of their relationship, this is a Finixio/Clickout team project that’s basically doing the same thing with 99 Bitcoins that we already saw them do with ReadWrite and Techopedia.
How 99 Bitcoins changed after acquisition: scammy memecoins to the fore
What sort of effect did new ownership have on 99Bitcoins?
The change happened in March of 2024.
Let’s compare 99 Bitcoins’ homepage then with how it looks now.
First, the signup form and on-page navigation section haven’t changed. Check out what’s being offered: a strong focus on learning about and beginning to use Bitcoin.
This section and the signup form remain identical: the website itself hasn’t really been altered.
The Top News section is also literally identical. Basic guides to onramping (getting some money onto a blockchain by buying crypto with normal, ‘fiat’ money) with Bitcoin and Ethereum, and only one mention of a meme coin, the venerable and relatively respectable Dogecoin.
Where things get interesting is the Latest News widget at the bottom of the page. Seven months ago, it looked like this:
Details about Bitcoin halving, understanding Bitcoin pricing, a look at Cardano, and talk about Grayscale and the SEC. In other words, respectable crypto stuff.
Let’s see if it’s changed a bit since…
Oh.
Let’s compare two of these, one from before the acquisition and one from after.
Check out the start of their March Cardano article:
https://99bitcoins.com/price-predictions/cardano/
Financial reporting from Isiah McCall. The article has a clearly pro-crypto approach and uses the vocabulary of the space, no doubt — ‘bulls,’ ‘layer-1,’ and so on — but it’s still responsible, fact-oriented reporting.
Compare it with a Feelgood Friday from about eight months later, when the new strategy and team were fully in place:
https://99bitcoins.com/news/feel-good-friday-trump-sues-cbs-lebron-james-kamala-harris-ad-civil-war/
This is supposed to be the same author, but I’d be prepared to bet it’s really a shifting staff of freelancers under a pseudonym.
It’s not conclusive proof but…
Anyhow, the tone, style and content are all wildly different. 99Bitcoins used to publish BTC and ETH news that looked like business and finance journalism, with guides to pricing and future expectations, quotes from relevant figures in the C-suite, and references to the regulatory environment.
That has been replaced by celebrity gossip, screenshots from the Website Everyone Still Calls Twitter, and sentences like:
like virtually every “celebrated” NPC icon, LeBron James stays in the safe space of intellectual thought.
That’s a lot of culture-warrior vocabulary, what looks like a clear political slant (especially considering the site is shilling coins linked directly to the Trump campaign), and a totally different approach to the subject matter. The site’s news section is now piggybacking on political news, and is thick with mentions of ‘shitcoining,’ ‘NPCs,’ and the kind of rhetoric you associate with 80s pro wrestling or histrionic Youtube react channels.
Speaking of which, the change on their Youtube channel has been even starker.
The 99 Bitcoins Youtube Channel: memecoins, gambling, culture wars
Here’s the 99 Bitcoins Youtube channel in March-April 2024:
It’s prices and technical guides, news and overviews, all hosted by a calm, knowledgeable middle-aged man in a channel-brand polo shirt called Nate Martin. There’s about one video a week, each about four minutes long.
Here’s Nate himself explaining what happened with 99Bitcoins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6F3mG1Kw-M
Let’s look at the same channel for May 2024:
https://www.youtube.com/@99Bitcoins/videos
You can see right where the change happens. Nate’s gone. These new videos are longer, and they’re louder. Price information has gone from ‘unusual Bitcoin rally’ to plausible-deniability claims of a coming 50% leap in BTC prices.
Right after the change, there’s a video nearly every day, and there’s a new focus, not on BTC, ETH and the handful of other coins that make up the ‘standard’ crypto world, but on memecoins.
For a lot of people, the difference between a memecoin and a cryptocurrency like ETH or BTC won’t be clear. I think this explanation from John Hargrave, Media Shower CEO and author of several guides to crypto investing, sums it up:
(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/investors-guide-memecoins-john-hargrave-bkbrc/)
Check out how these are all feelings. Attraction, lure, thrill, fear. There’s nothing in here about dispassionate economic calculation. This isn’t the thinking that leads you to put money in a company’s stock, it’s the thinking that leads you to put half on red because you can sense your luck changing.
So it looks like the Finixio/Clickout Media teams two main areas of actual business are gambling, and… gambling.
Now, the 99 Bitcoins Youtube channel looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/@99Bitcoins/videos
Celebrity stuff, two pictures of Donald Trump, one video in Dutch and two videos that are just about gambling.
Since I took that screenshot it’s actually gotten worse.
https://www.youtube.com/@99Bitcoins/videos
A wider international focus, more dubious pepe-themed memecoin promotion than ever before, and boosting for financialization of Ethereum futures…
Looks like what Finixio did to Techopedia, doesn’t it?
What memecoins does 99 Bitcoins advertise?
Memecoins are an inherently unstable and risky investment. It’s openly understood that they don’t have a function or a value, and you’re essentially betting on a craze catching on enough for you to pull some money out of it before it collapses.
Which coins are we talking about here? I’m no crypto expert, so I’ll rely on the research of Ben Solwin and the Twitter/X account CryptoRugMuncher (yes, really).
Here’s their list of coins they connected to Clickout Media:
- Love Hate Inu
- Ecoterra
- AIDOGE
- SPONGE
- Wall Street Meme
- Launchpad XYZ
- Mr. Hankey
- Burn Kenny
- TMNT Cowabunga
- Shibie
- Sonik
- Meme Kombat
- Sensei Inu
- Sponge V2
- Smog
- Scotty AI
- Frog With Hat
- Lucky Block
- Scorp Token
- Doge20
- DogWifCat
- Dogeverse
- Slothana
- MegaDice
- 5thScape
- WeinerAI
- Sealana
- Mega Dice Token
- 99Bitcoins Token
- 5thScape
- eTukTuk
- KAI
- Insanity Bets
- Shiba Shootout
- Memereum
- Hypeloot
- Lingo
- ScapesMania
- Blockbets
- Healix
- TG-Casino
- Base Dawgz
https://x.com/BenSolwin/status/1826978760484163639
Note that there are some familiar names in here, like Base Dawgz and Lucky Block. Again, throughout this series we will be coming back again and again to these projects as we spiral deeper into the Finixio team’s operations.
Buy the same token… company towns and vanishing coins
One of the most famous examples of ‘integration’ in the sense I used the term at the top of this post is the company town.
A company used to set up next to a mine, railway or plantation or factory and build some housing. You worked in the company workplace and lived in the company housing. There’d be a store, where you could buy what (the company thought) you needed. The company finally had control over the one part of its supply chain that could think for itself and cause problems: the workers.
But if you worked in the company mine and shopped in the company store, you often got paid in scrip: company money, only good at the company store, which often sold company products. If the same person sets your wages, the prices you pay and the value of your money… sounds like something might go wrong there. And it did. It was normal to somehow get deeper in debt the more you worked.
It’s the same thing with the Finixio teams tightly-integrated marketing, gambling and memecoin network.
You have to know that once you set foot inside this ecosystem you’re in a company town. Even the money’s funny.
True to that idea, 99 Bitcoins has its own token
https://presale.99bitcoins.com/en
If you try to connect a wallet, Best Wallet (an indirect Finixio team asset) is presented as one of your four choices.
https://presale.99bitcoins.com/en
If you don’t have a wallet, well…
https://presale.99bitcoins.com/en
The value proposition of 99 Bitcoins’ token is unusual.
https://presale.99bitcoins.com/assets/docs/whitepaper.pdf
Sounds a bit like they’ll pay you in their coin to watch their Youtube videos.
How’s that working out?
Yeah, that’s more or less what I thought.
Remember this price graph. You’ll be seeing a lot of Finixio teams coin price graph as we move through this series, and it’s tough to tell them apart, because somehow they all look the same.
There was an extensive presale period for the 99 Bitcoins coin. And at first glance, things look reasonably legit.
These details come from the 99 Bitcoins token contract. The presale reserve comes to about 26% of the total available tokens. That’s a lot more reasonable than some other Finixio team presales, as we’ll see.
But what happens after the presale? After they’re done claiming success for their coins, and the price curve turns red forever, where do those projects go?
Once a coin has served its purpose, it disappears.
99 Bitcoins hasn’t done a video on DogeVerse since March of 2024:
Remember way up at the top, in the section on casinos, I mentioned Lucky Block has its own coin? The period immediately after its launch saw one of the very few real success stories in a Finixio team presale, with increases of 20X and more.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/lucky-block/
Check out that price history. Have we seen this before?
If you bought Lucky Block crypto with Best Wallet on the advice of 99 Bitcoins, Crypto News and Techopedia, and then went to Lucky Block to do a little gambling with them… you were in the palm of the Finixio teams hand the whole time.
Vertical and horizontal integration meant you were in a company town, buying company products with company scrip. In a way, that’s what happens at a casino: you bet chips bought from the house on games run by the house. But when you go to a casino, you know that’s what you’re getting.
That’s not the case here. The connections are real but they’re — at the very least — not made clear. To me it looks like they’re deliberately hidden.
Not well enough, though.
Because we found them.
Read the next part of our series to learn about how Finixio teams gambling network has developed a reputation for dodgy dealing and scammy behaviour — and then stay tuned for the ownership and financial records that show how millions in real money flow to and from crypto and gambling businesses owned by the Finixio team.