I think the MUN Blockchain is a scam.

4 min readMay 22, 2023

I stumbled across the Mun blockchain, a new Cosmos-based chain that is currently doing a public IDO (token sale). Mun claims to be a remittance chain, but I think it’s a scam.

Why is that? Let’s find out.

Tokenomics

They’ve outlined their tokenomics on their website and in their white paper. All in all, they claim: “Following an open source community model. No whales, fair distribution via airdrops”.

Yet on their website they show the initial distribution where 60% of the initial supply goes to the Foundation and only 20% is used for airdrops. I find it hard to believe that this is a “fair distribution via airdrops”.

They’ve detailed the initial distribution in their white paper, available here. The distribution in there further shows how the funds will be allocated:

According to this chart, the Foundation would receive 20% of the offering as vested tokens. The amount of tokens allocated to all different types of token sales also totals 20% (including advisors).

All in all, this doesn’t look like a no whale approach to me. You could certainly argue that they’ve invested their own money and therefore have a long-term interest in the project. I’d say that 20% of the total offering going into token sales is a significant amount of money and a bit of a money printing machine without having delivered anything. They also haven’t announced a known and reputable investor yet.

The Team

There’s a team overview on the website and a short description about their role in the whitepaper:

None of them are known contributors to the Cosmos community. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as we need new people and creators in the Cosmos ecosystem. However, in this case the team is completely anonymous. There are no social media profiles (or even Github accounts), so for now we just have a profile picture, a name and a short description.

All their Github commits are made from an account called “Mun Developer”, which makes it impossible to trace any developer.

To me, this is a no-go for a team trying to raise money.

Community

On their website they claim to be the “fastest growing project on the Cosmos ecosystem.”

Personally, I don’t really believe that claim. They have 90,000 users on their Discord, which is impressive at first glance. However, there is no real in-depth conversation going on there. Instead, many projects just post things like “Good project”, “Good day” or just random emoticons. A vibrant community doesn’t look like that to me.

And I think a lot of people in there are just waiting for airdrops. You’ve announced a rektdrop, a stakeddrop, a lockdrop and a mission aiddrop, which will attract a lot of airdrop hunters. While this approach helps to boost community metrics, it’s not a sustainable growth as many of them will leave afterwards. (Note: I am not judging anyone’s intentions. I am referring to my past experience in this case)

The code

Now let’s have a look at the code. I’ve asked Jacob from Notional to help me, as he’s very familiar with the Cosmos SDK code. The Mun blockchain is available on github https://github.com/munblockchain/mun. The repository has been around since September 2022, but there are only 19 commits and they are all on anonymous disposable accounts.

But now let’s see what Jacob found:

“I checked and found that mun was vulnerable to cherry and to uncontrolled use of fee grants”

Cherry: https://github.com/munblockchain/mun/blob/214d382b06ba1541c6b8e4d8ace745778b5e6e2e/go.mod#L7

Fee exhaustion: https://github.com/munblockchain/mun/blob/214d382b06ba1541c6b8e4d8ace745778b5e6e2e/go.mod#L10

“I also noted a suspicious import of IAVL v0.20.0 though it’s replaced with 19.5 later in the file. Use of comet-db is also odd. There are multiple database versions that conflict with one another but with default settings the chain may operate as usual, specifically rocksdb is imported from cosmos and tecbot”

Furthermore, “all custom modules were built with starport, possibly the whole chain. The chain itself imports Juno v13.”

Besides that Jacob found that “the send and receive features of mun are entirely untested” as the “Ibank module does not have simulation tests and unit tests”

Full review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14AXOwF4VL-dN-nKL6f3n1t7i6-QGo80Zq2HZpMVOROg