Scam or Failure? How Third-Party Verification Actually Separates the Two in Crypto

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The Default Narrative

In crypto, when a project ends, the word “scam” tends to follow quickly. No evidence required. Prices fall, trading stops, and the assumption fills the gap — someone ran off with the money, someone was deceived.

marumaruNFT was delisted in December 2025. Even before that, the excitement had faded. The NFT marketplace business that was supposed to anchor the token’s value hadn’t worked out the way we hoped. Prices had been falling. The word “scam” started appearing in community channels.

The delisting accelerated all of it. Posts tying the project’s name to “rug pull” and “fraud” spread across X.

From what I observed throughout the project, holders who profited rarely spoke publicly. Those who lost money remained vocal — sometimes for years. That’s not unique to crypto. It happens in every investment market.

This article is not a defense. It is a record. Because fraud and failure are different things, and in my view that distinction matters — even when, maybe especially when, it’s uncomfortable to make.

The Market Performance

marumaruNFT launched in September 2022 on PancakeSwap.

The numbers are on-chain and verifiable. Peak liquidity reached approximately $6,000,000. From presale pricing, the token appreciated roughly 500x at its peak. That upward movement lasted approximately 12 months before the decline began — and the decline, when it came, was gradual rather than sudden. Public trading continued for over three years.

Compared to other tokens launched in the same period, this performance was unusually strong, though exact ranking depends on the dataset used. Most tokens launched in that era disappeared within weeks. Most of the remainder followed within months. Even among those that survived longer, early price action was often dominated by bots, leaving genuine investors with limited windows. That’s true of large global coins too, not just small projects.

marumaruNFT went up gradually for about a year. Then it came down gradually. Then it ended.

CoinW Exchange Listing

In April 2024, marumaruNFT was listed on CoinW, a centralized cryptocurrency exchange.

Getting listed on a CEX isn’t automatic. It involves legal review, team identity checks, tokenomics evaluation, liquidity requirements, and community activity assessment. After listing, marumaruNFT was adopted into CoinW’s asset management floor and selected as a staking target — both of which involve additional internal review. At peak, it held priority token status on the platform.

As trading volume declined through 2025, the classification was downgraded and the token was eventually delisted in December — consistent with standard exchange policy for tokens with insufficient sustained activity.

Verified sources: CoinW listing announcement, asset management floor adoption, staking designation.

Tokyo Stock Exchange Partnership

In October 2024, THE WHY HOW DO COMPANY, Inc. — listed on the TSE Standard Market under securities code 3823 — filed two separate timely disclosures through Japan’s TDnet regulatory system.

The first confirmed a strategic business partnership agreement involving Personpower Co., Ltd., marumaruNFT’s operating company. The second confirmed the installation of a marumaruAR experience booth at the Cho Maid Mura in AKIHABARA Cultural Festival 2024.

TDnet filings carry legal liability. Listed companies are responsible for the accuracy of what they disclose. Any named external partnership disclosed under these rules requires formal due diligence beforehand.

Verified sources (Tokyo Stock Exchange TDnet official timely disclosures):

The Akihabara Event

In October 2024, marumaruNFT participated as a sponsor in the Cho Maid Mura in AKIHABARA Cultural Festival, organized under AKIBA Tourism Council Co., Ltd. — established in 2018, representing over 700 Akihabara-area businesses, operating under Japan’s Agency for Tourism designation.

Verified source:


In October 2024, marumaruNFT participated as a sponsor in the Cho Maid Mura in AKIHABARA Cultural Festival.

Media Coverage

marumaruNFT received editorial coverage in U.Today and Bitcoin.com — both internationally recognized cryptocurrency publications with their own editorial standards.

These publications maintain editorial standards and do not provide coverage to projects they identify as fraudulent operations.

What the Record Shows — and What It Doesn’t

The organizations that independently engaged with marumaruNFT include a CEX with formal listing requirements, a TSE-listed company operating under securities law, a government-designated regional organization representing 700+ businesses, and international crypto media.

While these third-party records don’t align with typical fraud patterns, interpretation may still vary depending on perspective. What I can say is that this level of independent institutional engagement would be, at minimum, highly unusual for a fraudulent operation.

The project failed in the end. Along the way, it achieved something most token projects don’t. The founder documented the full journey — launch, growth, and decline — and published it as a public record.

In my view, failure and fraud should be distinguished. In crypto markets they are often conflated. The record above is why I think they’re different in this case.

What Being Called a Scammer Actually Looks Like

There is a pattern I have now seen from the inside.

When losses happen, the narrative locks in immediately. The operator stole the money. The operator lied. It was a scam. Once that conclusion forms, no amount of rational explanation moves it. I know this because I tried.

A few days after the MARU delisting, while the backlash was still building, I hosted a five-hour X Space. I answered every question, addressed every complaint, explained the structure of the project, its decisions, its failures. I had two legal advisors listening as silent observers. Their assessment afterward was that my responses had been entirely reasonable.

It did not matter.

When the Space ended, the reactions were: “Nothing but excuses.” “Only talks about himself.” “This scammer.” “Lies as easily as breathing.”

A community group was formed calling itself something like “Victims of Koichi Hatta.” There were posts about filing police reports for fraud. This is what happens when a project fails and the losses are real and the people who lost money are genuinely hurting.

I am not writing this to dismiss their pain. The losses were real. What I am trying to describe is the structural problem: when someone loses money in crypto, the default response is not “I made a bad investment decision.” It is “I was deceived.” The market’s basic principle — that participation is voluntary and outcomes are uncertain — disappears completely the moment the price goes the wrong way.

The community communications that project operators send during good times — “we’re building,” “this is going to moon,” “100x” — get reinterpreted retroactively as individual contracts. What was understood by everyone at the time as ordinary hype becomes, after losses, evidence of fraud.

How Close We Actually Were

To understand the scale of what collapsed, it helps to understand how close we actually were.

I posted personal content on social media — daily life, nothing to do with the project. The community called me “Aniki.” Older brother. I exchanged private DMs with holders. I went out drinking with them. In the context of crypto operations, this level of closeness between a founder and token holders is not normal. We built something that felt less like an investment community and more like a group of people who genuinely knew each other.

That closeness was the source of the community’s strength. And it was exactly what made the collapse so total.

When things went wrong, there was no distance left to absorb the impact. For them, it did not feel like an investment that had not worked out. It felt like a betrayal by someone they trusted personally. From their perspective, that is the truth. I do not think they were wrong to feel it. The closeness was real. The pain was proportional to it.

What I understand now is that the same thing that makes a community strong — genuine human connection — removes the buffer that makes failure survivable. When the project failed, the warmth did not gradually fade. It inverted instantly. The people who had called me Aniki became the people filing police reports.

I will not build that way again.

The Cost of Conflation

X still carries posts about me that range from misunderstanding to deliberate fabrication. Manufactured evidence of fraud. Accusations built from half-truths, misreading, and in some cases what appears to be intentional distortion.

I am a person. I have feelings. Every time I see those posts, something in me absorbs the impact.

The same voices have extended their reach to No NPC Society. A project being described as a scam before it has had the chance to prove anything. The pattern is familiar by now: if the person is compromised, everything they touch is compromised. It does not matter what the on-chain record shows. It does not matter what third parties have verified. The conclusion was reached before the evidence was examined.

I do not write this to ask for sympathy. I write it because this is what the conflation of failure and fraud actually costs — not just in reputation, but in the ongoing ability to build, to be seen clearly, and to be evaluated on what you are actually doing rather than what someone decided you are.

What This Experience Left Behind

When a token project ends, what remains depends on what was built.

What marumaruNFT left behind is a full-cycle market record, a body of third-party verified documentation, and a structural post-mortem.

That record remains publicly available. And in my view, the ability to distinguish between a project that failed and a project that defrauded — using verifiable evidence rather than emotion — is one of the things this industry most needs to develop.

Full verified record: https://github.com/NoNPCSociety/nonpcsociety.github.io/blob/main/docs/marumarunft-record.md

Koichi Hatta is a crypto architect and the former founder of marumaruNFT (2022–2025).


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