BanxShares will vanish from Coinmarketcap tomorrow. The cryptocurrency's reported valuation bears no resemblance to what people actually pay for it. The problem starts with how the market cap gets ca
BanxShares will vanish from Coinmarketcap tomorrow. The cryptocurrency's reported valuation bears no resemblance to what people actually pay for it.
The problem starts with how the market cap gets calculated. Multiply the total coin supply by the price, and you arrive at roughly $3.5 billion in value. That price—$1.87 per coin—originates from trades on Banx.io, an exchange operated by the coin's creator, Mark Lyford. The trades themselves consist almost entirely of wire transfers between private investors at undisclosed rates. According to Lyford's own admission, 95% of BANX transactions happen this way. "95% of the income from selling banx happens in wire transfers. so [sic] no there is no significant holding account for BTC," he told me.
Actual open market trading barely exists. The 24-hour volume reported by Banx.io shows 8,000 to 10,000 BTC in supposed daily trades. Yet the order book remains unmoved by this volume. Sell walls sit untouched despite the alleged activity. Either the numbers are fabricated or they represent private transfers that bypass price discovery entirely.
For a real market price to exist, two groups must meet: people willing to sell and people willing to buy. Plenty of sellers exist at the floor price. No buyers show up there. This gap tells you everything. When Coinmarketcap asked Lyford about the discrepancy, he initially claimed Bitshares integration would happen later this week. I told the Coinmarketcap representative that Lyford had told me the integration wouldn't arrive until year's end. The representative said he'd need to verify with Lyford. When he checked back, Lyford changed his story to the later date. Coinmarketcap's response came on October 13th: "Yes, starting tomorrow ICO coins (e.g. BanxShares) will not be eligible for market cap ranking."
Banx Central's core business is a $297-per-month subscription called Banx Platinum. Members receive one webinar monthly, email trading advice, a personal consultation with Lyford, and 170 BANX coins. The company calculates this as worth roughly $317 per month at the current quoted price. Marketing materials suggest the program actually pays customers to attend. The catch: investors sign contracts locking their coins for 12 months before they can sell. No guarantee exists that the price will persist once those holds expire.
When I pressed Lyford on whether the price would hold, he provided no answer. Market prices require ongoing transactions at that level. None occur.
Lyford's explanation of where Banx Capital generates profits shifted repeatedly. First he identified BanxMint and Banx Platinum as primary sources. Later he mentioned trading and mining activities. Then he pointed to Banx.io fees. Finally he settled on educational videos, affiliate sales through JVZoo, and webinars. JVZoo is a digital goods platform. Screenshots he showed me confirmed that most of Banx Capital's income flows through JVZoo. This last explanation matched what Banx Platinum actually does—sell educational content. The issue: Banx pays dividends to all coin holders. If those dividends come from money spent on educational products rather than genuine business revenue, the structure resembles a Ponzi scheme. Participants on the bitcointalk forum have leveled exactly this accusation.
One private investor told me his story. He purchased a mining contract in February 2015 and was promised he could sell his position in February 2016. The timeline has now shifted to June 2016. Yet Lyford informed me that the market would open by year's end when Bitshares integration launches, or by February at the latest once remaining coins sell out.
The investor was never paid the mining returns he was promised. Instead the company converted his contract into BanxShares. His compensation: more BanxShares, the same coin he cannot liquidate and which will almost certainly collapse in price once he finally can sell.
When confronted with this June 2016 date, Lyford responded: "Tell me who they are, Everyone who buy [sic] normally has a 12 months hold on there [sic] Banx. If you are refering [sic] to people who converted their mining contracts to Banx shares then that may be the case. 95% of people who had mining contracts converted to Banx shares."
He had never mentioned June 2016 prior to this challenge.
Lyford's previous venture was a cloud mining operation. It promised returns of 100 to 1500% above standard Bitcoin mining through a proprietary "multipool mining" method. Multipools have existed for years—nothing proprietary about them. The returns he advertised came from ZetaCoin and PayCoin. Both coins only achieved those profit margins at launch when difficulty was minimal and prices were highest. Both metrics collapsed immediately, making the advertised returns impossible.
The company charged a $500 security deposit, a practice rare among mining services. Lyford now claims operations have ended. Yet the promotional video remained online until I confronted him about false claims. He made it private on YouTube afterward, though I downloaded a copy. Like the Banx Platinum marketing video, it promises massive gains with minimal labor.
Asked to produce hardware proof, Lyford provided a single Bitcoin wallet address: 19nrwuF7EHCSrrCu8QAJ1jbHheNfU3164P. The address shows minimal activity. It received no transactions until May 2015—three months after Lyford said they stopped taking contracts. Just over 28 BTC ever passed through the wallet total.
Lyford claimed he secured a deal with Spondoolies to purchase their SP31 mining hardware. His contract promises required handling 100 terahashes per second of computing capacity—equipment that would need at least eighteen SP31 units. He said all this hardware would be running within five business days. I've requested comment from Spondoolies about whether this agreement ever existed.
When mining stopped, Lyford pivoted investors toward Banx as the replacement investment to restore their losses. Josh Garza employed the identical strategy when his company GAW shut down mining operations. Garza offered PayCoin to disappointed investors. Most were unable to recover their losses through that coin.
BanxShares is a copy-paste implementation of foocoin, a template developers use to create coins quickly. The source code includes references to foocoin by name. The technology contains nothing novel.
Lyford's website published financial projections without initially labeling them as such. A section header read "Year 1 Profits" with no indication these were estimates. Only after our conversation did he add the word "projections." The numbers still strain credulity. BitBanx projects 576 BTC in first-year profit despite having zero launched products. BanxMint claims 288 BTC in profit—a figure requiring sales of roughly 441 physical Bitcoin coins and 706 physical Litecoin coins before deducting manufacturing, shipping, and materials costs. The projections claim Banx.io will generate 695 BTC annually in trading fees. Current exchange volume makes this unachievable.
The site still displays projections for mining activities showing 2737 BTC in profit despite Lyford admitting mining has halted. When I raised this and noted he'd edited the site to add "projections" labels elsewhere, he made no correction.
Lyford's connection to other ventures adds context. He co-founded Remittio with Michael Taggard. Remittio possessed no operating history or products. Lyford filed the incorporation papers himself. Days after forming the company, Remittio announced a "partnership" with Banx. Lyford owned half of Remittio from inception—a fact neither founder disclosed in their announcement. They haven't acknowledged finding this misleading.
Through Remittio and directly, Lyford and Taggard have promoted LottoShares, a cryptocurrency-based lottery experiment, to webinar audiences with minimal cryptocurrency experience.
The history with other exchanges illuminates current circumstances. Banx briefly traded on C-CEX and Alcurex before disappearing from both. Lyford's account holds that someone deployed excessive mining power against the Banx network, compromised it, generated unauthorized coins, and dumped them on C-CEX. He said he informed C-CEX the ICO would run indefinitely but never provided supporting evidence.
C-CEX provided a conflicting narrative. They said the original wallet functioned properly. Lyford simply hadn't specified his ICO terms, so they ended it after reasonable time. More damaging: Lyford asked them to transmit "false" market cap numbers to Coinmarketcap. They refused. Afterward, Lyford changed the wallet and blockchain and declined to offer customers a "fair swap."
Lyford claims to possess Skype conversations proving his version. He's never released them despite the opportunity. The old blockchain should exist somewhere, showing whether excess coins were created. C-CEX could publish their trading volumes for BanxShares. Neither party has done so.
Banx Mint supposedly generates significant income through physical Bitcoin and Litecoin coins. If true, reviews and unboxing videos would saturate the internet. One article exists, published on Digital Money Times—a Banx Capital property. JP Buntinx wrote it. No independent reviews or videos appear at any scale that would generate meaningful revenue. Lyford showed me holograms used for the coins but never demonstrated sales figures or purchase proof.
On Banx.io fees, Lyford initially insisted the exchange charged zero percent for Banx trades. When I referenced the website displaying a 0.25% fee, he acknowledged the charge but claimed insignificance. If those fees contributed meaningfully to his profit explanation, he likely would have remembered them.
The BanxCapital website contains another red flag. It previously showed financial projections labeled "Year 1 Profits" without explaining they were projections. After our conversation, Lyford added that label. Yet the mining projections remained untouched despite him editing other sections and despite admitting mining has stopped.
Trading history on Banx.io shows volume unconnected to actual price movement. Massive daily volume leaves the order book static. Sell walls barely budge. Some trades must be fabricated. Others likely represent private wire transfers at rates outside the published order book.
The Banx Platinum promotional video claims to offer "the world's first Bitcoin debit card." Multiple debit cards already exist in this space. When asked what he knew about competing products, Lyford appeared unfamiliar with Xapo, the sector's largest operator.
Here's what happens next. Bitshares integration may never arrive, or it may come by year's end at the earliest. When decentralized markets function on the Bitshares network, price floors can't be enforced. Real supply and demand will set the price. Until then, the fictional market cap hangs in public view.
The mechanism is straightforward. Mark Lyford created a coin. He controls the exchange. He controls the price floor. He controls the supply. He profits when people pay for educational classes bundled with substantial quantities of the coin. Dividends supposedly flow from other customers, not from actual business operations. Coin holders face locked-in contract periods preventing market testing. When locks expire, gravity reasserts itself.
Lyford has said investing in Banx is investing in him. He's right. Most profits depend on his capacity to attract more people to his educational programs, which sell unrealistic Bitcoin return promises. Investors receive marketed liquidity that vanishes under inspection and proof of market size that falls apart on examination.
Before publication, Lyford accused me of accepting money from NXT, a competing cryptocurrency, to boost that coin and publish this critical piece. He referenced an unfounded claim by Blue Meanie, a notorious Bitcoin forum troll who routinely makes baseless accusations that people were paid promoters of certain coins. Blue Meanie has produced zero evidence. I've never taken money from NXT and have owned no more than $50 worth of the coin. Lyford threatened to post Blue Meanie's troll thread if I didn't approve his preferred tone. "but like i say it seems like you have your own shit hitting the fan, which if this story is twisted in anyway I will only be too happy to point people too," he wrote. He claimed this wasn't a threat. The meaning appears unambiguous.
