Bernard Lau

I BUIDL and HODL

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

STORY TIME

Let the storytelling begin.

This is the untold story of LABS, GEMS and Staynex.

The story will be include multiple parts, before joining LABS, and when I was involved actively, how everything happened and the actions that were taken that has led to this day.

First and foremost, I would want to clear the misconceptions that I was hiding. I was doing so based on legal advice, due to what happened over the last 8 months or so. I apologize for not stepping up sooner, but I wholly intend to follow the rules by the book.

Over the past few months, there were plenty of stray dogs barking about thievery, stealing and the lot. Lets decipher all of them in these posts.

What I will share in these posts may be used against myself and my ex-colleagues. But I guess those involved in this fracas and the community which I came to adore deserve to know what has happened behind the scenes even though the breakup wasn't pleasant.

I may not have been the right person to lead the project, but I tried saving the sinking ship and I tried my very best to make it happen. I may make more enemies after this or some may change their minds after understanding what happened, time will tell.

Some documents will be made public, so the public may go through them to make your conclusions. Some will be kept private for legal purposes in the future.

For further action to be taken or clarification, if any investors felt they have been duped, be it Crowdfunding members for Kunang Kunang and Arena, RED Fund members, etc, my DMs are open if you require materials for legal action.

Lets go down the rabbit hole. Its a long story, and will be broken down into multiple parts over the next few days.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 10 : Kunang Kunang Loan

Note to : RED Fund Members, KK Crowdfund members

With a couple of weeks away from the payment date, Yuen Wong came to me and said that he didn’t have enough funds and directed me to take a loan from Kunang Kunang with the resort as collateral. I told him that it was crazy but if he insisted I would help him to get it.

He is absolutely confident that the LABS tokens will definitely rise in value, and we can cover the loans easily. I hesitantly contacted my business contacts in Indonesia and managed to secure a loan for $600,000, but with the Indonesian company shares (PT LABS Indonesia) that owns the hotel as collateral, with a 20% interest of which to be paid by 30th June 2023.

He took the deal, signed the documents himself and got it apostilled in Hong Kong. I felt it was an act of mindless gambling and something which was not sensible at that point. I grew up in a way that money management is important as when you build a hotel and you run out of funds, the whole project stops. It clearly isn’t the case here as Yuen Wong is looking to go for an “all in” or go home scenario.

The Arsenal announcement didn’t do much to the token price, thanks to Sam Bankman Fried collapsing FTX exchange about the same time, causing a huge crash in the industry. We had a few thousand left in the bank for the next few months and he had to liquidate LABS tokens. I have to remind him to pay salaries and bills at the end of every month.

What I didn’t fathom was I had the burden of Arsenal bill and the loans on my shoulders with

NO PRODUCT, NO PLATFORM & NO EMPLOYEES

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Annexure C : Magna Law

I received legal letters from Yuen Wong via Magna Law, a cease a desist letter when I resigned as a Director at Staynex.

Lets delve deeper into Magna Law.
Please connect the dots yourself.

https://t.co/JD5j2rdspy

https://t.co/IwbXMYmLBp

https://t.co/Ri0AuOr0CG

https://t.co/9FuIwY8DVK

A new Staynex Company is registered on the 2nd January 2024 that I'm totally not involved, registered at #54-18 The Sail @ Marina Bay. It's not an office, its someone's house. I've been there to discuss the Arena Hotels lawsuit.

Yuen Wong & Malcolm
Your funds are SAFU

Bad boys, bad boys
Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 9 : LABS V2

In the midst of mad scrambling for funds to fund the Arsenal deal, Yuen Wong went into a few deals that may / may not be detrimental to the LABS token.

That included a few personal loans with LABS tokens as collateral.
(He did repay one, I don't know about the rest. One of the creditors did liquidate $200,000 worth of tokens because of late repayments, but that involve a police case too)

Apart from the publicly known DWF deal, he has attempted to solicit similar "Token Subscription Deals" from these Crypto Funds. One of which that has caused us to migrate to LABS V2 was a botched deal with a company called GEM Digital.

There was "NO" security breach.
I repeat. There was NO security breach.

A deal which he has signed, and brought forward.
I was instructed to then transfer 400,000,000 tokens to GEM Digital. After multiple attempts of trying to activate the withdrawal, and "continuously failing" due to low price action and volume, Yuen Wong got a Singaporean Web 3 company (which I will not name) to create LABS V2 - which cost us $15,000 or so (but was paid in LABS tokens on a monthly basis) - monies wasted.

In an attempt to prevent any potential dumping / black swan event, Noel Chia had to immediately take snapshots of all wallets and airdrop LABSV2 tokens to everyone excluding GEM Digital wallets, and push LABS tokens to history.

We are not tech guys, we had no one else in the company and we had to do it manually. Which was kinda fucked up. Airdropping to 10,000 - 11,000 wallets.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Breaktime - 20/6/2024 (16:15pm)

ALL BUSINESS IS WELCOMED. THANK YOU!

I wonder whats making Yuen Wong so nervous?
Let me finish my story man. We haven't even reach the half way mark!

If a person resorts to threatening family members, there MUST be a massive load of shit and lies that he doesn't want uncovering.

That is my wife's boutique by the way. Anyone who needs a good makeover, do come visit. For anything else, you can always find me for coffee.

All those who are involved with Yuen Wong.
TAKE NOTE

@labsgroupio
@staynexcom
@gemsgg_official
@binance
@solanium_io
@GameFi_Official
@myrtleology
@pratikgauri
@RWA_Finance_
@News_Techub
@PixelRealmlabs
@KryptoTzar
@CrosstheAges

My DMs are always open.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 8 : Arsenal FC

Securing the Arsenal deal was a moment I was proud of, considering they did believe in what I was trying to build. But at the moment, the whole deal did not make any financial sense.

After removing the Hong Kong office and giving away severance fees, the bank account had at most $50-100k by my estimations(the only bank account I knew off. I do not know of any other existing crypto wallets).
I was never given a budget, given full transparency of finances (only based on reports), we were depending on monthly handouts from Yuen Wong to build and survive.

For context, the Arsenal deal was $3 million, of which
the first 50% was paid in November 2022, 25% in May 2023 and the last payment to be made in November 2023.

Why would you spend on such a deal when we did not have a product, no platform, no office, and only 2 employees. We didn’t have money in the bank account, we barely even had any funds to build the product.

Yuen Wong insisted on pursuing the deal as it would boost the token price, again this is something which was totally beyond how I usually work.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Disclosure:

I do not have full knowledge of where or how the funds are spent.

As mentioned in earlier posts, I only know $2 million went to Gravity for the purchase of Kunang Kunang

And the $2 million spent on Arena Singapore in Bugis.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Annexure B : -

These were LABS & GEMS finances in October. Take note, that I joined in September 2022.

$270k cash in October

Monthly burn rate that peaked at $510,000

Was I designed to fail?
What were the salaries like I wonder?

If LABs + GEMS + all the NFT sales + REDFUND + Pegasus cards + Crowdfunding and what not were there, thats >$10M USD.

How was the $10M spent? Only one person can answer that, and that ain't me.

Again, these all happened before I came in. I was in the jungles of Bali building the resort.

Through my tenure, along with the entire team in Vietnam, our burn rate was about $55,000 - $60,000 per month, with about 25 staff. I'll explain more how we got there in the future posts.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Not forgetting to mention our hardworking team of Community Managers that came on board with us:

Chuks
Scarr
K9INE
Dale

Thank you for your hardwork and support all these months

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Post 7 : "Keep Building in the Bear Market"

I had a thousand questions in my mind but I decided to keep faith and go on with it. I wasn’t one to shy away from challenges *after all he did pay Gravity Resorts for the property, I decided to give him benefit of the doubt* I decided to push the consequences aside as Yuen Wong has ALWAYS assured me that he would fund the project.

“Mr. I have invested in 80 projects” is something that plenty of you have heard of in his various talk sessions and chats, and has always insists that he is a multi-millionaire (*up till recently after he threatened one of our ex-employees without paying salaries) but most of his funds have been locked, or “some founders refuse to send him the tokens” - hence the liquidity crunch.

I made the necessary decision to remove the entire Hong Kong office, tech team and to move the entire operations back to Malaysia which costs a fraction of the operations cost.

What I was promised to lead a team to build LABS and Staynex, was cut down to just myself and Noel Chia, the only 2 people left in LABS. I asked Yuen Wong to drop the Arsenal deal, but he insisted on pursuing the deal as it would boost the token price, and he insisted that he would find ways to fund it.

What do I know right? I’m the new guy in Web 3, Cryptocurrency makes millionaires in days.

Once the Arsenal deal was agreed, we had a month to make payments

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Annexure A : - Letter of Demand

Letter of Demand representing

Myself
Noel Chia
Tim Duong

Lets continue the story in a few hours.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Post 6 : Rude Awakening

After signing on as a LABS employee, I was then introduced to the team, to make formal introductions and to learn what are the ongoing projects and to receive a proper handover.

It was public knowledge that LABS token was a billion marketcap project in March 2021, and had a very successful raise of multiple millions. This was a short 18 months after, and LABS did not have a working product or any platform. What they had was a crowdfunding platform, which was manually managed at the backend.

Despite paying their developers USD$30,000 - $40,000 a month for the past months, there was no product that was market ready.

The other shocking discovery was that the company had less than 2 months runway with a burn rate of almost USD $346,000 a month, with a cash balance of $540,000 on 7 September 2022.

I was quite in disbelief and questioned Yuen Wong on how I was supposed to build a platform with such resources. And also to pursue the Arsenal deal.

I also then realized, that he was running LABS and GEMS simultaneously with funds being mixed on both accounts. If my memory holds, LABS raised $4-6 million USD, and GEMS raised $3.97 million early 2022. $346,000 and $540,000 was the operating and cash balance for both LABS & GEMS

These figures exclude Crowdfunding, RedFund, NFT sales which could easily be north of $1 million. The major expenditure that I know of is Kunang Kunang $2 million and Arena $2 million.

Where did the rest go?
How was it spent?
Was it mismanaged?
I'm not here to judge but all these happened before my tenure and I have no answers to the questions above.

I sat together with Andy Koh from GEMS, and said that the accounts must be split in order to have any form accountability. He agreed.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 5: Inception

In the months of July up to September, I got myself busy participating in various blockchain events to learn more about the industry. Considering LABS did purchase a major stake in my property, I decided to return the favor and accepted his offer. The original idea was to be LABS CGO (Chief Growth Officer) while Yuen Wong was CEO, and slowly transition as time progressed.

Prior to my official appointment on 1 September 2022. I was speaking to Arsenal on LABS behalf and was getting to their senior management. I’ve had meetings with them multiple occasions explaining what GRC(Staynex) was about, and they bought into the idea. A deal was swiftly discussed and that fast tracked my appointment as CEO. I was excited to get the ball rolling as soon as possible.

The details were negotiated, which includes the price, terms and commercials. I was over the moon and was excited to get the ball rolling asap.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 4 : GEMS and ARENA

I must admit that LABS was the first crypto business I’ve tried to run. I knew about running businesses and have exited a couple companies but the tokenization of assets was something I was still new to. Moreover, the LABS token has already been launched for over 2 years, I didn’t know how many tokens were distributed and transferred to VCs, how much was still in circulation as the wallets were not held by me at that time.

Yuen Wong did sell the idea to me keenly, he mentioned that he would “fund the entire project” and would bring brands such as Arsenal into the picture. On the 3rd day of the trip, I was invited to participate in a meeting with Arsenal, and that was when I got to know about GEMS, and also Arena E-Sports (*a hotel crossover with cyber cafe concept which I believe are now in legal dispute with and failed due to mismanagement. The supposed hotel is situated in Bugis and was meant to open in July 2022, but never happened)

The partnership with Arsenal was originally meant for GEMs and Arena. *After multiple meetings, Arsenal did not buy the idea of GEMs and Arena.*

In the following months, I met Andy Koh, GEMS CEO and the Arena CEO, a Singaporean who was in charge of developing Arena E-Sports I observed on the side as Yuen Wong was aggressively trying to tell the public that he aims to get to 50 hotels in 3 years, as was shown in the GEMS deck. While I was pondering on Yuen’s offer, I assisted in locating 2 venues in Malaysia for their expansion. I felt it was a very aggressive move, considering that the venues in Singapore were never completed. Recalling my experience, he has made plenty of promises to the Arena CEO to open the hotels but has never fulfilled them. That includes getting the Arena CEO to put a deposit for the Malaysian properties and backing out at the last minute.

During my visit to Singapore Blockchain Week in July 2022, I visited Arena Singapore and was shocked by the progress that they have made over the past 8-9 months, it was far from completion considering that the opening dates were just around the corner.

I gave advice to Yuen Wong saying that something was not right, and advised him to put a hold on all Arena investments and do an audit on the company who was doing those renovations. Lo and Behold, the property was never completed and LABs have been in a court case with Arena Group since the end of 2022.

I was forced to participate in some of those legal meetings when I was LABS CEO even though I did not know the original details of the project, and have not followed up since, nor do I know the progress of those cases.

Also, I have never met any of the previous LABS Founders, Mahesh and Pat, I have only met Calvin Ng from Plutus VC. I have only known that all the founders were removed one by one, but none of them were still there when I stepped in.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 3 : Kunang Kunang Development

The deal with LABS took months to materialize. From point of first contact in March 2021, and eventually completed towards October/November 2021. I believed that RED Fund and Crowdfunding activities were done similarly at that time.

My job at that point was just to complete the construction of the property and made sure everything was done well. At that point of time, from November 2021, I was working on a side project called Gravity Residence Club (GRC), which then evolved into LABS Club, and which we all know today as Staynex.

I met @Jumichul (who was a long time LABS investor) when the hotel soft-opened and shared with him my vision, even before LABS came into the picture. We faced a 2 months delay for the resort development due to COVID issues, but ultimate we completed the resort end of March.

In May 2022, the soft opened, and we hosted the LABS team at Kunang Kunang for the first time. That included Yuen Wong, his wife and some people from his team. It was the first time I met Yuen Wong in person, we exchanged pleasantries and introduced ourselves face to face.

Throughout those 4 days, I got to learn more about LABS, about what they do and took an interest in their future endeavors. I shared my idea of GRC to him, and he took a keen interest in it. I was then invited to join LABS group as CEO and to bring the concept of GRC along with it, as he mentioned time and time again that he wanted to move away from management and step up to be Chairman.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 2 : Red Fund Members

The RED FUND guarantees investors a 10% guaranteed yield for 2 years, and then a profit share based on the original valuation of the property. Sales of these NFTs were supposed to be then distributed to RED FUND members, as an early exit, but due to dismal sales, I think that never happened.

As far as I know, the total investments collected from RED FUND members amount to $450,000 USDT, but as time passed during my tenure, more and more investors came to me with SAFT documents claiming they have invested a lot more, with the total amount reaching about $700,000+.

I honestly don’t know the full amount invested, as when I came in as CEO, I wasn’t given the information nor I do not know who else invested into the project, those who kept track of the funds were no longer there.

No data was given to me, and I had to rely on information from DMs from LABS Group Telegram myself.

Apologies to the rest that didn’t get the 10% yield as I do not know nor verify who else invested. The same goes to those that participated in the crowdfunding for KK, Arena E-Sports, LABS Member Card, Pegasus programs etc. Plenty of people came to me, but there isn’t really much that I can do as I was operating in the dark and I wasn't furnished with all this information.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

Part 1 : The Beginning

I run a company called Gravity Resorts, that builds and manages properties in Indonesia, Thailand and Japan. On the side, I invest in crypto here and there on a personal basis made money, lost money, just like most of you.

I’ve been in the hospitality and Real Estate industry for more than 8 years now. And thankfully the properties that I own and manage survived COVID without any major issues.

So if any of you have seen what ExposingStaynex has wrote about me and my family, I live a decent and comfortable life prior to LABS, with or without crypto. I can afford some luxuries in life and I have to admit I was better off before I joined LABS. I wonder who owns that account? 😁

My first dip in Crypto was in 2017, so I’ve been through a few cycles, experienced the rug pulls and scams that most have went through, but that didn’t deter me from believing that blockchain could be the future. I’ve always been interested in tokenizing hotels and resorts to see how we could expand our services into Web 3. Lo and behold, sometime in March 2021, I came across this company called LABS. I was quite interested in what they did, sent a message and offered one of our resorts to be tokenized.

Yuen Wong picked up my messages, sent his team of evaluers over to check on the project, and finally decided to go ahead with the purchase of 90% of the resort for $2 million USD which we all now know as Kunang Kunang Tent Resort.

LABs would own 90% of the resort and Gravity maintains a 10% ownership. Please do not assume we made profit from this, visit the place and check how much it costs to build a resort of this stature in Bali.

While the deal was being concluded, I was told of a RED FUND program started by LABS Group where investors have invested into the program as early investors, and then NFTs were to be minted to be sold to other investors. The final % amount that LABS intended to acquire KK was ultimately dependent on how successful the RED FUND sale went, as he was always fluctuating between 51% and 100%, but ultimately settled for 90.6% equity.

[Bernard Lau @bernard_gravity]

@EggTartMilkTea @token2049 @projectPXN See you guys