Sylwester Suszek, former CEO and Founder of BitBay was reported missing by his family on March 10th and has not been seen since. The disappearance is being reported uniformly by the media with vague accusations of criminal activity by Suszek and some of the original Bitbay shareholders.
Good information is not easy to find. When you dig a little deeper than the mainstream headlines, you end up wading through machine translations of articles that were clearly originally Polish. The allegations are far from well-established facts though, and Bitbay is much more than just the “cryptocurrency exchange” they are trying to portray it as.
According to Coincentral Bitbay is a free, decentralized marketplace for buying and selling goods and services on the blockchain. You can connect directly with peers and transact without the need for a middleman like Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist. Transactions are secure and anonymous. They’re also guaranteed by escrow.
Bitbay’s roadmap tells us that the first public release of a fully-featured web marketplace with DDE-enabled smart contracts is “in planning”. The name Bitbay should be a clue. It seems this guy who has “disappeared” was working on systems to replace some of the most lucrative aspects of Big Tech with a decentralized and free solution.
An alternative to the mainstream story starts to look at least as plausible as what we’re being told. An advocate of freedom has been tyrannized for 6 years with false allegations and smears to his company’s reputation, and has now “disappeared” just as his first public release of an Amazon and eBay killer was about to drop!
If we look at the allegations, they fall well short of convincing. Suszek responded in 2020, outlining a phenomenon we have since become quite familiar with: “journalists” allegedly creating the news they want to publish.
“As a result of an internal investigation, which we conducted in cooperation with a detective company, a person was found to allegedly give Michał Fuji a financial advantage. This man was persuaded by a journalist to play a role in a kind of staging, the recording of which was to deprecate my credibility and reputation of the BitBay exchange itself. The said man decided to testify the truth and become a witness in the case, expressing regret and feeling responsible towards unfair behaviour detrimental to the good name of the BitBay company.“
It’s worth investigating, at least. It may be nothing at all, but most reporting doesn’t even try to look into the matter, they all just repeat the same small number of points. Is he even still involved in Bitbay? Suszek stepped down as the president and CEO and BitBay was apparently rebranded as Zonda last May. Zonda is indeed just an exchange, and claims to be founded in 2014, yet Bitbay itself still has a website.
What do you believe happend to Suszek? Let us know in the comments and on Twitter.
