The Crowd Machine Crypto Token Theft: What We Know Thus Far

Just a few days ago, Crowd Machine was working to build a crypto replacement for Amazon Web Services.

On Saturday, according to a post by the Crowd Machine team, a hacker compromised the company's cryptocurrency wallet and stole a large number of the application's native Crowd Machine Compute Tokens.

Crowd Machine attracted attention after two developers from Blockstream, one of the most prominent cryptocurrency startups, left to join the project in February this year.

One of those, Ben Gorlick, became CTO, though according to his LinkedIn page he left Crowd Machine in May. The second, Johnny Dilley became chief of system architecture for the new company, although now his LinkedIn page does not list Crowd Machine and the company's site does not include him as a team member.

Saeed Al Darmaki, a former advisor to the project who quit this month because - he alleged - Crowd Machine did not pay him the token compensation he was promised, told CoinDesk that "Poor management" by CEO Craig Sproule had prompted employees to leave.

Crowd Machine's goal is to build a globally distributed cloud, a sort of Amazon Web Services that would not be subject to the control of a single company or suffer from a single point of failure.

According to the company's website, this "Crowd Computer" is scheduled to be released in the fourth quarter.

Crowd Machine conducted a pre-sale of CMCT tokens in April, but has not continued with its planned series of 390 daily public sales.

As some pointed out on Crowd Machine's Telegram, Bittrex requires users to upload identification, which may have allowed the authorities to make an arrest so quickly.

In an update on Medium, Sproule recommended that no one trade the tokens until the authorities had finished their investigation, though he wrote that "Purchases of stolen tokens by those not involved with the theft will be honored."