Although it’s presented as a third-party company, T7X is also credited as being behind Trusted Smart Chain’s blockchain.

This is from Trusted Smart Chain’s website FAQ;

The founder of T7X also established and launched the Trusted Smart Chain blockchain to provide a secure and compliant foundation for RWA trading across decentralized platforms.

“RWA” stands for “real world assets”. This ties into T7X presenting itself as a “gateway to real world asset investing”.

Trusted Smart Chain runs a node investment scheme, through which investors receive “daily token rewards” after investing in TSC token node positions.

The marketing ruse is profits are generated through “real world asset tokenization” – which brings us back to T7X.

So who’s running T7X and Trusted Smart Chain, and why is it a problem?

When BehindMLM reviewed Trusted Smart Chain in January 2025, we identified former iX Global promoters Mark Williams Schuler (aka Billy Beach) and Travis Flaherty as frontmen for the scheme.

iX Global was an unregistered investment scheme sued by the SEC in 2023. There are also multiple iX Global criminal cases in India.

Both Flaherty and Schuler (Beach) were named defendants in the SEC’s iX Global case. The case was voluntarily dismissed due to procedural errors on the SEC’s part in May 2024.

The underlying iX Global securities fraud cited in the SEC’s Complaint remains unprosecuted.

T7X came up in BehindMLM’s review in relation to regulatory compliance. In that neither Trusted Smart Chain or T7X are registered with the SEC. As of January 2025, T7X had not publicly named its founder.

Following a reader tip-off, sometime between January and very recently T7X briefly disclosed Matthew Nicosia as its founder:

That information has since been scrubbed from T7X’s website, but is able to be confirmed elsewhere:

So why would T7X want to hide acknowledgement of Nicosia as its founder on its website?

Well, turns out Nicosia has his own history with the DOJ and SEC.

Matthew Nicosia is known to BehindMLM as CEO of Regeneca, a California-based weight loss MLM company.

One of Regeneca’s supplements was RegeneSlim. Following two incidents with the FDA over DMAA being found in RegeneSlim (2012 and 2014), the DOJ filed for a civil injunction in 2015.

A complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California alleges that dietary supplements sold by the defendants are adulterated because they are not manufactured in accordance with the FDA’s current good manufacturing practice regulations.

One of the dietary supplements, a product called RegeneSlim Appetite Control (RegeneSlim), contains the ingredient 1, 3 dimethylamylamine (DMAA), an unsafe food additive under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, but does not declare DMAA as an ingredient.

In addition, the defendants market RegeneSlim to be used as a disease cure.

Regeneca settled with the DOJ and agreed to cease business operations in 2017.

In  2022 the SEC filed a complaint against Matthew Nicosia, this time in Utah.

According to the SEC’s complaint, filed on September 27, 2022, from August 2019 to at least September 2020, defendants Nicosia, Reininger, and Touchard worked with others to fraudulently sell stock in microcap companies by making misleading statements during high pressure sales calls and/or email promotions.

I initially wasn’t sure if the SEC’s Nicosia was the same guy. Regeneca’s and T7X’s Matthew Nicosia appears to be married to Tara Nicosia, currently cited as T7X’s Compliance Director on its website.

Tara Nicosia’s LinkedIn and FaceBook profiles place her in Utah:

Matthew Nicosia settled the SEC’s fraud charges for $795,590 in April 2023. As part of his SEC settlement, Nicosia was explicitly prohibited from committing further violations of the Securities Exchange Act.

T7X’s official FaceBook page was created a month later in May 2023.

As at September 2025 we have T7X hiding Nicosia’s involvement in T7X from consumers. There’s also the question of whether Nicosia is behind Trusted Smart Chain.

Last month Trusted Smart Chain held an “event”. A 28th August FaceBook from Travis Flaherty showcasing the event reveals prominent T7X branding (in fact I didn’t see any Trusted Smart Chain branding):

With T7X having created and presumably managing the underlying tech Trusted Smart Chain is built on, it’s not unreasonable to put forth Matthew Nicosia is also running Trusted Smart Chain.

For its part, Trusted Smart Chain offers this clarification on its website;

While T7X leverages the TSC Blockchain to support its operations, it does not control the blockchain.

All decisions regarding the development of TSC, including updates and listings, are made by the decentralized community of TSC node owners.

What Trusted Smart Chain doesn’t disclose is who owns the majority of TSC nodes and generated tokens. Any ideas?

Trusted Smart Chain’s and T7X’s securities fraud is bad enough. The guy running the show having already had a run-in with the SEC over securities fraud… well you can put two and two together as to why Matthew Nicosia disappeared from T7X’s website.

Back in February BehindMLM reported on Trusted Smart Chain marketing material citing Utah Mayor Trent Staggs as a T7X board member.

All marketing material pertaining to Staggs was quietly scrubbed shortly after that report was published.

As of July 2025, SimilarWeb was tracking 60% of Trusted Smart Chain’s monthly website traffic from the US. The other 40% comes from Brazil.

Over the same month, SimilarWeb tracked 84% of Trusted Smart Chain’s website traffic originating from the US.

Travis Flaherty is the sole admin of the official Trusted Smart Chain FaceBook group.

The group is private and hosts 1,141 members at time of publication, the majority of which are assumed to be US residents.

Trusted Smart Chain’s native token, TSC, is not publicly tradeable. TSC’s internal value is pegged to whatever Trusted Smart Chain and T7X allow investors to cash out at.