G.U. Technologies Global (the "Company," or “We”) is a marketing partner of Japan Open Chain Project (the “JOC Project”), a blockchain project initiated by Japan Blockchain Foundation, Inc., a company incorporated under the Japanese law (“JBF”) and, as an ecosystem member, has been committed to marketing of the JOC Project, especially for a marketing outside of Japan such as exhibiting at events. We have been granted JOC Tokens by JBF that are to be used for raising awareness of the JOC Project and expanding the ecosystem.
As part of this effort, as publicized in the press release, from May to November 2023, we sold right to receive JOC Tokens to initial supporters pursuant to the Purchase Agreement for Future Tokens (the “SAFT Agreement”) (*1) under the Singapore law. The tokens to be issued under the SAFT Agreement are those to be allocated to initial investors pursuant to the white paper of the JOC Project.
On November 11, 2024, JBF announced that, after a rigorous review process, JOC Tokens will be offered to the public by BitTrade, a crypto-assets exchange operated in Japan, through an IEO (Initial Exchange Offering) at a price of 30 Japanese yen per token. After this announcement, we came in contact with information that the rights to JOC tokens (the “Rights”) might have been illegally resold to third parties.
The investigation revealed that Comps ITL Pte. Ltd. (a company incorporated under the Singapore law, “Comps”)(*2), one of the purchasers of the Rights, might have illegally resold the Rights to third parties by disseminating false information. Specifically, Comps is suspected of reselling the rights to 12,531,493 JOC Tokens at a price of $0.25 per token based on the false information that the IEO price is $0.5 per token. The official IEO price of the JOC Tokens was officially announced on November 11, 2024, after confirmation by the financial authorities on November 8, 2024, and there has been no public announcement as to the token price prior to that date.
As part of our immediate incident response, we notified Comps of the revocation of the Rights due to material breach of the SAFT Agreement, and also reported this incident to JBF, an issuer of JOC Tokens, the relevant authorities, and other related parties. Also, we are anticipating that this scam will cause a substantial number of victims. In order to help these victims recover from their losses, we will deposit the JOC Tokens that were scheduled to be issued to Comps with an appropriate agent, and demand Comps to return to the victims all funds obtained from the illegally sold Rights.
We will make every effort to clarify the incident and keep updated on it to the relevant authorities and other related parties. Also, we will make public announcements as appropriate regarding developments in this incident.
Note:
*1: Each SAFT Agreement provides for the sale of the right to acquire JOC Tokens at a price of $0.1-$0.11 per token (approximately 15 Japanese Yen on the date of agreements) if the JOC Tokens are listed on any of the crypto asset exchanges. The terms of the SAFT Agreements are plain vanilla ones based on common practices for crypto assets in Singapore. The SAFT Agreement sells the right to acquire tokens in the future, not the tokens themselves, and the tokens themselves have not yet been granted or transmitted to the purchasers.
*2 About Comps ITL Pte. Ltd.
Company Name: Comps ITL Pte. Ltd.
Representative: Yoshikazu Nishimura
Location: 390 Havelock Rd. King's Centre #07-02, 169662, Singapore
Mr. Nishimura was a co-founder of our parent company, G.U. Group K.K. (formerly G.U. Labs K.K.), at its inception (April 2018), but he has no employment or officer/director position with us since his resignation in December 2019. He currently holds the position of CTO of alt, Inc., a Japanese corporation listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange, and has no involvement in the Japan Open Chain project (launched in April 2022) or the establishment of JBF Inc. in July 2022.