Last week, Patricia announced that it converted customers’ assets into its Patricia Token (PTK), months after the company made a $2 million hack public. Now the company has said its plan to repay customers is tied to its profitability.
Nigerian crypto platform Patricia has announced that it will use a newly created debt management token—the Patricia token—to repay customers the $2 million in customer funds lost in a hack. According to Patricia’s white paper, a smart contract will lock the tokens—which are dollar equivalents of respective customers’ assets—and gradually release them on a monthly basis. While the company did not specify the token’s vesting schedule, it was easy to spot one key detail: customers will only get their money back if Patricia is profitable.
Per Patricia’s white paper, “This [smart] contract will lock the tokens and gradually release them based on the exchange’s profitability. This approach aligns users’ compensation with the success of the platform, promoting transparency and trust.” As a private company, Patricia does not disclose its financials, and customers will have questions about how they can independently verify the company’s profitability.
Hanu Fejiro, the company’s CEO, told TechCabal, “Our OTC Desk has been fully operational, and it is growing and bringing in revenue. We are totally confident in the redemption of Patricia tokens and that we will be able to pay our customers with the proceeds from our operations and our fundraising efforts.” He also added that Patricia is “working with legal partners and the product team on measures to launch a feature that guarantees transparency.”
There are also valid concerns about the absence of a smart contract for Patricia’s debt token. On the token’s vesting schedule, Fejiro said, “The vesting schedule remains in its early stages since users are yet to convert to Patricia Tokens. This would commence on a scheduled basis once we relaunch the app.”
While public opinion is primarily skeptical of Patricia’s debt token, the company’s founder is hoping this will play out like Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange platform that successfully used debt management tokens to recover 119,756 bitcoins eleven months after they were compromised in a hacking incident. But Patricia will need to do more to win over an understandably jaded public; it will need to show more transparency, share more information about its smart contract, and think announcements through before it shares them with the wider public.
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