119% Per Week UPDATE: The Math is Dead Wrong!

When is 119% really 19%? When you run a DeFi site and you don’t understand basic, financial math.

That’s the underlying flaw with BNBmatrix, the site I’ve been testing for the last seven days.

Their pitch is this: Deposit Binance coin ($BNB) and earn 17% per day, 119% per week. (You can make deposits for any term between 7 and 30 days.)

To me (who spent 17 years as a financial writer at The Wall Street Journal, and was a hedge fund trader/analyst) and to anyone else who understands basic, financial math, that implies that if you deposit 1 BNB, then at the end of the seven days, your wallet will hold 2.19 BNB.

THAT is a 119% return.

Not so, to the founders of BNBmatrix.

They argue — as they did with me in a long back-and-forth on Telegram — that if your 1 BNB grows to 1.19 BNB (which is what happens, spoiler alert) then you have a 119% return.

Thus, in their world view, they are offering investors 119%.

Dead. Wrong.

Here’s the analogy — and I will let you, dear Reader, decide who’s right:

Wells Fargo Bank today offers a 0.01% annual interest rate on its Platinum Savings account. If we deposit $100 into that account, at the end of a 1-year term we will have $100.01.

Can Wells Fargo, therefore, advertise that you are getting a 100.01% return on your money?