In an interview from his home in the U.K., John Karony, SafeMoon’s 25-year-old chief executive officer, emphatically denied that his token is a Ponzi scheme. “I put everything, my identity and my credibility, on the line for SafeMoon,” he said.
Although analysis of a single factor and cryptocurrency combination, as above, is of interest, more general findings across multiple cryptocurrency/factor combinations can also be pursued. Fig 7 shows, for each cryptocurrency and factor combination, the mean coherence values during the bubble and non-bubble regimes. Each horizontal subplot shows a different coherence period band, from the lowest period band (2–4 days) at the top to the highest period band (256–512 days) at the bottom. As the duration of data for each cryptocurrency varies, certain ranges are left blank when that cryptocurrency does not have enough data to produce values for such bands.

Jack Purdy, a senior research analyst at crypto analysis firm Messari Inc., said that while he didn’t know how risky SafeMoon might be, its website makes it clear that it’s designed to get investors to buy and hold to “earn passive rewards through static reflection as they watch their balance of SafeMoon grow indefinitely.”
Subscriber growth is harder to track than the other metrics. Only the current subscriber count is displayed for a particular subreddit, and historical data cannot be rebuilt retrospectively as subscribers do not have a visible historical imprint. A third-party website, RedditMetrics (http://redditmetrics.com/), has been retrieving and storing real-time subscriber counts; however their data on the particular subreddits of interest only reaches back to 2012 so the subscriber growth analysis can only start at this point. Fig 2 shows the three social media metric time series for each cryptocurrency; note that subscriber growth is the only metric that can have negative associated values, caused by more users unsubscribing than subscribing on a particular day.