If an investor were to read the SEC filings of VCI Global, they may find it difficult to understand its risky ties to Tether and Solana.
Amid a sort of information vacuum and other executive disappointments in 2025, holding shares of VCI Global since their open of trading on a “100 million OOB token digital-asset-treasury transaction” announcement would have earned a 31% loss in less than four weeks.
Longer term shareholders have performed even worse. Anyone’s investment since the start of the year has suffered a catastrophic, 99.9% loss.
Year-to-date chart of VCI Global. Source: TradingView
Oobit (OOB) is a tap-to-pay app that uses its proprietary token as well as stablecoins like Tether (USDT) for mobile device payments.
VCI Global is a microcap Nasdaq stock with a market capitalization in the single-digit millions and a float of less than 24,000 shares.
The company is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and apparently has a problem with CEO impersonation fraud, according to a prominent notice on the company’s homepage.
That’s just the beginning of its problems. On November 26, the company claimed to have acquired 4,174,603 additional OOB tokens “from the open market,” yet that disclosure refrained from mentioning that it acquired the vast majority of its OOB without any purchases, devoid of market forces from exchange listings of OOB.
Specifically, the company already owned 250 million OOB tokens — priced before the token was trading on Kraken or other major exchanges. Its 4.1 million token purchase at $0.24 was merely an investment of $1 million.
The company characterized the tiny purchase and 1.6% increase as the “initial phase of our US$50 million accumulation plan.”
Focusing on what actually matters, 98.4% of the company’s OOB holdings were transferred by investors who received 50 million shares worth of VCI Global stock and pre-funded, immediately exercisable warrants.
Tether’s PIPE gets the cheap price on OOB
Those 250 million tokens were favorably priced at $0.20 — 73% lower than their $0.73 high within a 48-hour period of that headline.
Brazenly, the company claimed that this 250 million token transfer “paid” — with no actual cash transaction nor placement agent — for VCI Global’s entire $50 million Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE).
On the other side of that deal, Tether Investment Limited received 39.8% of the PIPE shares.
Straddling both sides of the deal, Tether is also a top investor in OOB, leading its Series A fundraise, alongside Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakavenko.
In other words, an entity agreeing to the pricing of the OOB tokens was the same entity receiving the majority of the PIPE shares.
Read more: Tether took over the White House, now it’s tearing it down to build a ballroom
This whole thing relies on Kraken keeping OOB up for trading
According to Cory Klippsten, a Tether critic who has been involved in litigation against the stablecoin giant, “This structure lets an effective change of control happen without triggering a 13D.”
Klippsten characterized the lack of VCI Global’s SEC Form 13D plus other factors “a possible material breach of SEC Rule 12b-20.”
Protos doesn’t have a view on that allegation, and only a US securities attorney could provide advice regarding those forms.
The timing, pricing, and catering of both sides of the deal to related parties is certainly interesting. Kraken and other exchanges like KCEX activated trading pairs of the OOB token within 48 hours of the November 10 VCI Global deal.
In fact, a substantial portion of the deal explicitly relies on Kraken’s OOB trading pair staying up and operational.
If Kraken suspends or withdraws its OOB listing within six months, VCI Global “shall have the right to rescind this agreement” by returning OOB and reversing the VCI Global shares issued.
