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?

Of course not!

That’s fundamentally ridiculous. Banking regulators would be all over Wells Fargo like the SEC on Ripple.

You are getting 100% return OF capital (the return of your original deposit), plus a 0.01% return ON capital (your profit). Your return, very simply, is 0.01%.

As such, when you do the math (and I have) BNBmatrix is really offering a 19% weekly return, or 2.52% per day, compounded for seven days.

Period.

There is no other way to argue this point unless you’re using voodoo math invented solely for the purpose of luring in crypto degens who are trolling the interwebs for eye-popping returns.

Now, to address the bigger issues people have and which they are asking me about: Is this a scam? Can you even withdraw your money?