Litecoin, Dogecoin, Blackcoin and Neoscoin requested to be delisted from Coin-Swap. The move follows the recent announcement of Josh Garza's Paybase’s acquisition of the cryptocurrency exchange.

On January 2, the four altcoins respectively dropped off the cryptocurrency exchange and requested Coin-Swap remove Litecoin, Dogecoin, Blackcoin and Neoscoin trading. The move, explained the four respective representatives, is overall aimed at boycotting the acquisition of Coin-Swap by Paybase.

"I have been pondering about this in my head for a while, ever since I learned that GAW acquired Coin-Swap, and I made the ultimate decision to make a formal request as a Litecoin Association representative to request removing Litecoin trading from Coinswap," wrote Litecoin Association's director Andrew Vegetabile, in a public announcement.

"Our position and statement on the matter coincides with what others have addressed: sufficiently questionable statements, practices, and notable 'erasures' of past claims and promises," stated Blackcoin representatives. 

Cointelegraph spoke to four representatives from these communities: the Litecoin Association's director Andrew Vegetabile, the Dogecoin Foundation's chairman Jens Wiechers, Neoscoin's lead developper Kris Borodiansky, and the Blackcoin Foundation's Joshua Bouw, to get their input on these recent announcements.

While sentiment towards the previous owners of Coin-Swap was fairly positive, the recent acquisition of the exchange by Paybase raised concerns, notably with regard to the obvious conflict of interest arising from owning an exchange and launching a cryptocurrency.

"This could give [Paybase's] parent company [GAW Miners] the ability to artificially [inflate] the price [of Paycoin]," warned Vegetabile.

Dogecoin Foundation's Jens Wiechers told Cointelegraph:

"Dogecoin, its founders as well as the Foundation, has always advocated for transparency and accountability in the running of cryptocurrency businesses and the debacle that was the moolah.io scam of "Alex Green" made that lesson very clear to the entire Dogecoin community. [...] The community was initially very positively disposed towards them, but the behavior relating to their mining pool (restricting pool choice for their hosted miners etc.) as well as the establishment of Paycoin was viewed with concern by many of us.

"GAW Miners has continued to become more and more [opaque] about its business processes as time went by, and their recent acquisition of an exchange creates a considerable conflict of interest that could only be addressed satisfactorily by being very transparent. Their claims are dubious, even if one is very generous and their recent censoring and deletion of references to their previously made commitments breaks the last straw so to speak."

In response to Paybase's move, the four communities decided to step up and boycott Coin-Swap, for the sake of users and the overall crypto community.

"This is me not sticking my head in the sand when I have the opportunity to voice my concerns and look out for my community's best interest and the crypto community in general," stated Neoscoin's Kris Borodiansky.

"I would prefer that this entire ordeal be somewhat of a lessons learned that the multiple communities are no longer going to sit back and watch event unfold as others continue to create bad news," said Vegetabile, adding:

"Crypto currencies are not about making money, it's about helping people, [helping] the unbanked, the remittances. [It is] a way to give money back to the people. [...] We here in this channel are no longer going to take this anymore and need to protect not just our communities but each others as well in order to ensure we are all safe from this. Not to say GAW is 100% a bad actor, but I have certainly been around the block to know when I can see something crashing down and, as mentioned before, giving us all a black eye."

Denials

Over the past few months, GAW Miners has been a hot topic, raising fairly passionate emotions from both fans and critics. While some believe GAW Miners' CEO Josh Garza is launching a true cryptocurrency revolution, others have suggested he has been leading an elaborate scam operation.

GAW Miners

The criticism and skepticism were notably raised by a series of questionable statements and the behavior of the company, among which was one claim that Paybase, a payment platform for Paycoin, had partnered up with Amazon to enable payments of merchandise in the cryptocurrency on its shopping portal. Similar claims were publicly made involving other leading companies including Target and Walmart. News media Coinfire investigated the allegations, which had all been denied by the said companies.

Reaching out to Amazon, Target and Walmart, here are some of the answers Coinfire received:

"Amazon is not affiliated or partnered with GAW Miners or paycoin," said an Amazon spokesperson. "If this company believes it can imply a partnership with Amazon we will be seeing them in court if they don’t stop doing so immediately."

A spokesperson from Target stated: "Target does not have any record of any partnership with GAW Miners or anyone named Josh Garza. Any statement contrary to this is false. We have no intention of accepting 'paycoin'."

And finally, Walmart spokesperson Tara Greco, said her company has no relation with GAW Miners, Paycoin or any other project that involves Josh Garza or GAW Miners:

"Walmart has no intention of expanding our current payment options to accept PayCoin from GAW Miners or any affiliate of the company. Any statements implying this is the case are false."

While Garza had denied all charges of wrongdoing, some of his statements and actions had raised skepticism among the crypto community regarding the legitimacy of his enterprises and the honesty of his intentions.

Meanwhile, altcoin communities have raised their voices to dispute Garza's involvement in the crypto sphere, firmly determined to enhance the true value of cryptocurrencies as enabling people to transact in a more efficient manner, while excluding the bad players.

Along the same lines as Litecoin, Dogecoin, Neoscoin and Blackcoin, ShapeShift.io officially announced on January 3 its decision to remove Paycoin from its exchange, primarily due to a former statement made by Garza and the cryptocurrency's administrators on promising traders that paycoins would be bought at US$20 each on Paybase:

"Anyone who studies markets should know that guaranteeing the price of anything is a fool's errand. But indeed, if Garza had his alleged $100m in capital he could perhaps back the value of Paycoin at $20 per and actually make good on the promise. It's unlikely, but possible.

"And yet here's what happened: not only did Garza not fulfill his promise to back the value of Paycoin at $20 per coin, but himself and his administrators seem to be actively re-writing history, scrubbing their forum of any mention of that promise.

"This moves it from fool's errand to the realm of deception."

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