Apollo Coin: The Counter FUD of One of the Most Active Cryptocurrency Communities

There is no way a cryptocurrency project would succeed without a vibrant and or active community of users or investors that believes in the project. The first world acclaimed digital currency Bitcoin has a robust community of users which is evident by its high market cap and general acceptance and this unique community of investors is a model that other projects hope to surpass. Since Apollo coin was created in 2017, it has done quite fine to earn some trust in the cryptosphere, a trust currency under scrutiny.

The FUD surrounding the Apollo Network

FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and doubts. These term that now generally acknowledged in the tech and business world was pioneered by IBM and later embraced by Microsoft, FUD is the catchphrase for a strategy used to sow anxiety in the minds of potential customers by insinuating that rival technologies are untrustworthy and under supported. This strategy coupled with the volatile nature of the Cryptosphere can cause untold damage to a promising coin project.

Quite recently, FUD arose due to a reddit post by some users who clearly have a grudge against Stephen McCullah, Apollos business developer in which they accused him of being a scam and dumping coins. The post instilled fear in the Apollo ecosystem in which users questioned the integrity of the system as well as its long-term potentials amongst many other concerns raised

Apollo’s Counter FUD

Counter FUD is a response or series of steps taken to counter wrong or negative allegations targeted at frustrating the growth of a promising project. As is required of every potential coin, the Apollo team developed a comprehensive whitepaper and technical documents for which investors can revert back to, but its true that most investors hardly read such documents, the company through Steve McCullah therefore responded comprehensively to some of the allegations made, below are few of his counter FUDs:

Code Modification:

Steve claimed that Apollo’s developers have added and/or modified over 100,000 lines of code. This is in response to the statement from the published article that “They have several other insignificant changes to the code (I'm talking seriously insignificant – like it changes nearly nothing) and will hail them as the greatest lines of code ever written, using big technical-sounding words to trick their extremely devoted, cult-like followers…”. Apparently, this notion is false as the Apollo team have added Apollo Updater which enables the blockchain to update using transactions from the blockchain itself and ChainID technology which allows us to change the blockchain properties without forking as well as allowing backwards compatibility. These two features are few of the major changes that requires a long line of codes that were implemented by the Apollo team.

Allegations bordering on the dumping of coins:

The comprehensive response given to this allegation is that “this could not be further from the truth. Currently we have a circulating supply of over 15 billion with nearly 200,000 wallets created. A few months back nearly every wallet in existence was funded by one of the two foundation wallets (through our original coin distribution event and airdrops). We are talking about 170,000 wallets. There is absolutely no way that we can track every transaction from every wallet. And stating that because a wallet sold that was funded by one of these two wallets means the foundation is dumping is unbelievably ridiculous, every single APL that’s in circulation originated from these wallets”. Steve affirmed also that the team have being very transparent in handling transactions from all wallets.

Another scalding comment was that the founder Stephen McCullah has no degree and is fond of changing his LinkedIn profile. The founder confirmed to have earned a biology degree from Lamar University and the allegations stemmed from a mistake from his LinkedIn account set up.

Final Words

FUD is and remains a means to discredit good and promising projects. Some allegations might be true but most of the time, it’s only a ploy to bring a good project down. The general advice is to watch out for the Counter FUDs by the projects admin and if it is in tandem with already established trusts and innovations outlined by the team from the outset, investors should try to help allay the fears from the community.