How crypto companies go bankrupt: Yesterday, I learned that Phaver, a social media app, had closed operations with all socials gone. Token down 99% since TGE in September. I had high hopes for Phaver merging Lens and Farcaster ecosystems, with 35K DAU and 800k downloads. At peak, they had 50% of Lens traffic and 20% of Farcaster's. I asked their team member on what happened and three things stand out: 1. They messed up TGE and airdrop. It led to hours of portal failures, causing FUD as people couldn't claim immediately. 2. They overpaid for CEX listings: Paid more than $1m USD for 5 CEX listings. SOCIAL still trading on Bybit, KuCoin, Gate etc. 3. Ex-employee said the team decided not to sell any tokens at TGE as FUD was already too high. This was a mistake as they were short on cash for operations. TL;DR – Phaver ran out of funds. As a Finnish company, it also had to pay employees during the 1–2 month notice period. All this despite raising $8m at ~80M valuation from Polygon Ventures, Nomad Capital etc. A common story in crypto. Still, some ex team members are working on @ai_socialdao to give utility to SOCIAL