Moshe Hogeg said he was a “small” but “significant” part of the Tomi team, handling a network solution that seemed to allow transactions of ERC-20 tokens without an Etherscan record.
Disclaimer: The article is updated to clarify allegations about Moshe Hogeg and his time in house arrest.
Moshe Hogeg, an Israeli entrepreneur, has returned to the spotlight of the crypto industry after speaking at a conference in Morocco on “alternative internet network” Tomi.
Speaking at the Nakamoto Forum in Marrakech on June 6, Hogeg was one of a handful of project leaders at Tomi who spoke on the network’s privacy features to a crowd of investors, representatives from crypto and blockchain firms, and members of the media.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Hogeg compared himself to other industry leaders, including Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who was targeted by United States authorities in their case against the global exchange. The Israeli entrepreneur claimed officials understood the power of public opinion among those in crypto and the financial world and conducted “a well-orchestrated attack” to damage his reputation.
“I see that more and more key figures in the crypto industry are becoming targets to authorities,” Hogeg told Cointelegraph. “Whenever there’s something like this, [...] they try to eliminate the risks. I think that something very similar happened to me in Israel.”
The entrepreneur was arrested by Israeli authorities in November 2021 for allegedly engaging in "sex crimes and cryptocurrency fraud." However, Hogeg said there had been no official indictment in his case, which largely required him to be under house arrest for less than a month.
Several members of the Tomi team introduced features of the project, ranging from a content creator platform to minting nonfungible tokens. Hogeg described himself as being a “small” but “significant” part of the Tomi team amid his own controversies in his talks at the Nakamoto Forum.
Related: Privacy should be considered in ‘potential retail CBDC’ — Treasury official
As part of a demonstration for attendees, Hogeg and a Tomi developer showed how they encrypted Tether (USDT) to create a “totally private” token. He spoke on the network’s privacy solution, which seemed to allow crypto users to send ERC-20 and Ethereum-based tokens without any trace of the transaction on blockchain analytics platform Etherscan.
“Ethereum is great, but Ethereum is not private,” Hogeg told attendees. “Privacy is a basic, basic right. So, developing a technology that allows you to transact billions of dollars without risking your privacy is groundbreaking.”
With the addition of Hogeg to the team, Tomi recently raised $10 million for the project on top of a $40 million funding round the firm announced in March. The price of the network’s tomiNET (TOMI) token surged to an all-time high of $6.59 on June 6 amid the Nakamoto Forum, but has since dropped to $4.70 at the time of publication.
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