CluCoinPrice

(CLU)

CluCoin is no longer active following the founder’s admission of fraud. The founder, Austin Michael Taylor (known as DNP3), pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to prison in early 2025. Federal authorities are currently managing a restitution process to return forfeited funds to victims. To facilitate this, the government announced they would contact affected individuals via NFTs sent to their wallets to provide instructions on the recovery process.

The founder leveraged his access to the project’s charity and marketing wallets, which were funded through transaction taxes. Instead of using these assets for project development or charitable donations, he transferred the funds to personal accounts at online casinos. This breach of fiduciary duty led to federal prosecution and the eventual collapse of the entire CluCoin ecosystem, as funds intended for the community were used for personal activities.

CluCoin utilized a mechanism called reflections designed to reward long-term holders. A tax was applied to every transaction on the network, and a portion of that tax was automatically redistributed to all existing token holders. The remainder was directed toward the liquidity pool and a dedicated charity wallet. This model was intended to incentivize holding and create a sustainable source of funding for the project's philanthropic initiatives.

A core pillar of the project was its dedicated charity wallet. A portion of the transaction fees was directed to this address, and the community was intended to vote on regular distributions to various charitable organizations. While the project was marketed as a revolutionary philanthropic endeavor, these funds were unfortunately among those diverted by the founder for personal use, leading to the project's legal downfall.

CluCoin was primarily a BEP-20 token on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), chosen for its transaction efficiency and low fees. Before the project's collapse, the token was available on major decentralized exchanges and select centralized platforms, including LBank. It was created by the founder DNP3, a prominent streamer whose large online following and reputation as a philanthropist were the primary drivers of the project's early popularity.

While CluCoin underwent audits by independent security firms, these assessments typically focus on the smart contract's code to identify technical vulnerabilities or bugs. They are not designed to audit the personal integrity of founders or the manual movement of funds from project-controlled wallets. This highlights a critical lesson for the industry: technical audits do not necessarily protect investors from centralized management fraud or the misappropriation of assets by those with administrative access.