An X (Twitter) account named GM AI Fraud has made a series of posts about a Vietnamese businessman, Hung Dinh, pointing out that he is allegedly involved in a scandal related to investors’ cryptocurrency via GM.AI, an AI project.

The case has stirred up the Vietnamese and global blockchain community, especially when Token 2049 Week is near. There have been many comments about the case, showing concern that the scandal would have a negative impact on the projects of Vietnamese developers in the international market.

Why has Hung Dinh caught the special attention of the cryptocurrency community?

GM.AI is a project using AI on Solana blockchain ecosystem, which conducts transactions on thecchain, providing detailed information and managing complex transactions.

GM.AI once successfully mobilized 150,000 Solana ($30 million) in March 2024. However, the project has been criticized as being late in implementing commitments. And rumors about GM.AI have spread rapidly.

Hung Dinh, or Dinh Viet Hung, is a well known businessman of the Vietnamese technology and startup community.

He is a famous but is also controversial for implementing many projects, such as Rada Network, The Parallel, DeFi Horse and Orbitau.

The businessman from Nghe An studied at famous schools and has a bachelor’s degree in economics, but later joined the technology community. He was an English major student at the Phan Boi Chau High School for the Gifted in Nghe An and studied at Hanoi Foreign Trade University.

Hung Dinh did not study information technology at school, but chose to start a businness in this field.

He started with useable online tools and earned a lot of money. Hung Dinh with JoomIArt created a great success, with products attracting 50 million users all over the world. And the project helped turn him into a dollar millionaire at an early age.

In an interview given to ICT News in 2021, Hung Dinh related a story about the birth of JoomIArt. 

“When I took an extra job during time at university, when learning about e-commerce, I realized that the internet era was coming and all businesses would need to have a website, like businesses all need a Twitter or a Facebook fanpage, or Linkedin or Instagram account,” he said.

“However, at that moment, only 10 percent of companies in the world had their own websites, and only large corporations had websites, while SMEs (small and medium enterprises) didn’t. Meanwhile, no technology firm had solved the problem of websites for enterprises in a simple way. Therefore, I decided to focus on this and created MamboTheme, which was later renamed JoomIArt,” he recalled.

He explained that he set up a business in a foreign country and targeted the international market because demand for products such as JoomIArt for Vietnamese companies was nearly zero.

In 2015, Hung Dinh introduced DesignBold, an online design set of instruments which allowed amateur users to easily create designs. It was considered a rival of Canva, the famous global designing platform.

Hung Dinh then began making investments and buying businesses. He said that he lost nearly $2 million when pouring money into startups in Vietnam because the projects failed.

Just three days after the beta version was launched, DesignBold got 700 orders with total revenue of $27,339. In its first operation period, DesignBold got many prizes and was highly appreciated by investment funds with estimated value of no less than $100 million.

However, DesignBold stopped operation in 2021. Recently, he has focused on blockchain and invested in cryptocurrencies.

In 2021, Hung Dinh said the decentralized finance market is a product of blockchain and its capitalization value skyrocketed by eight times (more than $2 trillion) just within one year.

These are good signs for the Vietnamese technology community to jump into the field and exploit capital. He stressed that if Vietnamese businesses were late, the cash would flow to foreign businesses.

However, the finance market is a complicated playing field. Never before has the combination between technology and finance created such a strong cash flow movement like now.

“A new wave of billionaires has been created. If the Bitcoin price hits the $200,000 peak, 50 percent of billionaires in the world will be those who invest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies,” he said.

Manh Ha