Baby Musk Coin rug pulls after a $2 million January ICO
The Baby Musk Coin memecoin launched in January, promising to "revolutionize the meme industry". The coin enjoyed a $2 million ICO the previous month, despite warnings from observers who noticed the coin couldn't be sold, and who described it as a honeypot. Sure enough, on February 9, the project developers suddenly transferred 1571 BNB out of the project and quickly mixed it using Tornado Cash, earning a tidy profit of around $653,300. The sudden sell-off crashed the coin value to 0, leaving remaining holders with a worthless coin they were unable to sell. Developers took down the project website, Twitter account, and even their "Baby Musk dance video".
Samsung launches environmental sustainability-themed metaverse scavenger hunt where people plant virtual trees and earn NFTs
Samsung launches a "sustainability-themed quest" on their "Samsung 837X" Decentraland metaverse project, where they invite characters to hunt for "recyclable product boxes", plant trees in the (virtual) forest, and earn NFT badges.
The press release doesn't happen to mention that the Decentraland project is built on Ethereum, which was at the time a proof-of-work blockchain that used over 100 TWh of electricity per year — around the same amount as countries like the Netherlands or Finland.
The BBC publishes (and then deletes) a puff piece on a "self-made crypto-millionaire giving back" without mentioning his scam coin
The BBC featured an article on their homepage about Hanad Hassan, "a 20-year-old who made millions trading cryptocurrency [who] is set to open a food bank to give back to his community." They mentioned that "he and his friend ... set up a special cryptocurrency together, donating all the profits to charity." What the BBC failed to note was that the project, Orfano, was apparently a scam — after the project launched and received investments, the duo shut it down and took the money. The BBC took their article down without explanation shortly after publishing, though it is still accessible via the Internet Archive. The BBC had also originally announced that there would be a 30-minute feature on the man on their BBC One channel running later that day, but replaced it with a different segment.
- "Birmingham's self-made crypto-millionaire giving back", originally published by the BBC and archived on the Internet Archive
- Tweet thread by Jim Waterson
- r/Orfano
- "BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute", The Guardian
Someone appears to trade on insider knowledge of Coinbase listings
In early February, Coinbase listed the Aventus token ($AVT) on its exchange and added support for Pawtocol ($UPI). Shortly before these announcements, someone created a new crypto wallet and spent more than $350,000 buying AVT. The listing news didn't result in much of a price bump for AVT, so the trader tried again — cashing out the AVT and putting it into UPI in advance of that announcement. They found success with this trade, ultimately making a profit of around $734,000. The timing of the trades, combined with the relatively unknown nature of $AVT prior to the announcement, strongly suggests someone had insider knowledge of the upcoming announcement.
- "Evidence of Insider Trading at Coinbase", FullyCrypto
$36 million taken from retirement accounts of IRA Financial customers investing in crypto
IRA Financial, a platform for managing retirement investments, boasts of being "the first self-directed IRA company to allow their clients to invest in cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, directly via a cryptocurrency exchange". Unfortunately, they were probably also the first to have that feature exploited, when an administrator account was apparently compromised and users' funds were transferred out of their connected Gemini accounts. Two days later, IRA Financial publicly acknowledged "suspicious activity that has affected a limited subset of our customers with accounts on the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange". The stolen funds, taken in a mix of Ethereum and Bitcoin, amounted to around $36 million.
Exploit of Superfluid vesting contract nets attacker $8.7 million
A vulnerability in the Superfluid crypto streaming protocol allowed an attacker to drain $8.7 million, affecting projects including Mai Finance, Stacker Ventures, Stake DAO, and the Museum of Crypto Art.
Longstanding British photography institution baits-and-switches investors with NFTs
The British Journal of Photography is a magazine and institution within the fine art and documentary photography world dating to 1854. In June 2021, they asked for investments, but were optimistic about the organization's performance, saying that they projected 6x returns over the next four years. They were successful in raising £1.8 million (about $2.4M) in shareholder investment. In November, the organization emailed investors announcing the launch of ART3.io, "our foray into the fast-growing NFT space", but still seemed optimistic about the "game changing opportunity for the business" that it would present.
On February 2, some Twitter users were confused to find themselves suddenly following the Twitter account of an NFT operation, as BJP had taken its existing 250,000-follower Twitter account and rebranded it to "ART3.io" and begun promoting various NFTs with posts of "gm". The primary BJP organization started a new Twitter account, @bjp1854, which had a total of around 1,500 followers. On February 8, investors received an email from BJP announcing the company had been sold, and that they would be paying back shareholders £50,000 of the £1.8 million, a 92% loss.
U.S. Department of Justice arrests duo for trying to launder billions stolen from Bitfinex in 2016
The U.S. Department of Justice announced that they had arrested a New York couple and seized more than $3.6 billion in Bitcoin that they were allegedly trying to launder. The fortune was a portion of what was stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex breach, which saw the exchange lose around 120,000 BTC — then valued at around $71 million but worth around $4.5 billion at today's BTC prices. The husband and wife pair, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, both describe themselves as tech entrepreneurs; Morgan also describes herself as a "surrealist rapper", and her work sure is surreal.
News of the arrest came only a week after 20,000 BTC from the Bitfinex hack was observed being moved. Although the DOJ didn't explicitly say that this movement led to the arrest, it seems like a safe bet.
LooksRare team cashes out $30 million in wETH, panicking their community
The team behind LooksRare, an NFT platform known for its enormous proportion of wash trading, cashed out around 10,500 wETH worth around $30 million. They had earned the wETH by staking $LOOKS tokens, the platform's native token. A LooksRare team member explained that "The fact that the team earns WETH has never been a secret", though it certainly seemed to come as a surprise to many in the community.
The discovery of the withdrawal caused panic, with some community members believing it was a sign that the team was rug pulling. Some also questioned the team members' choice to send the funds to a cryptocurrency tumbler, believing this meant they were trying to hide the cash-out from community members. One might understand why they would try to hide it: after the withdrawals became public, the value of the native $LOOKS token crashed around 15%.
More broadly, the fear around the team cashing out illustrates a common belief among some crypto project communities: that if you cash out even some of your holdings, you're not a true believer. A LooksRare team member explained that the team behind the project had "been grinding night and day for 6+ months" without payment and had collectively fronted "more than 7 figures in costs" before the platform launch (reassuring!), and the withdrawal was simply 10+ team members finally receiving payment. Apparently unsatisfied with this explanation, the community tried to demand the team use their wETH to repurchase $LOOKS, though it doesn't appear this has happened.
SuperRare parts ways with its community manager over racist tweets, she hosts a disastrous "apology" Twitter Space
The same week as bigoted tweets from an ENS director Brantly Millegan surfaced, so too did racist tweets by Ashni Christenson, then-community manager for the NFT platform SuperRare. Christenson, who is white, had presented herself as an ally to people of color and other members of marginalized communities in her work with SuperRare. The first tweets to appear were from 2011, where in several instances Christenson used the n-word when quoting rap lyrics. SuperRare quickly announced that they had "parted ways" with her, and Christenson tweeted that she had "stepped down". Unlike Millegan, who doubled down on his statements after they resurfaced, Christenson appeared apologetic for what she had written in the past. She expressed on Twitter: "wish I got the chance to take accountability & talk about this". She apparently decided to try to do so by hosting a Twitter Space, oddly called "a warning to all web3". The Space went well for her in the beginning, with several people speaking up in support of Christenson and condemning SuperRare for the firing, and with Christenson championing a project she led at SuperRare to highlight Black creators and expressing how upset she was over "the situation". Several commenters expressed that they thought this was "cancel culture" at work, and that web3 was supposed to be resistent to "censorship" and "canceling".
However, as the Space continued and amassed several thousand listeners, several Black women stepped up to express that her apologies didn't seem genuine or self-reflective, and that the Space appeared to be little more than an opportunity for other white people in the web3 community to "forgive" her and pat her on the back, as she gained followers throughout. The women who spoke up immediately began to receive extraordinarily racist and threatening mentions and direct messages on Twitter from various people in the Space.
As the Space was ongoing, more of Christenson's past tweets surfaced, several considerably more recent than 2011, and none involving song lyrics: several that were racist towards Mexicans and one that appeared to be questioning the experiences of rape survivors. When one speaker asked how old Christenson had been when she made the 2016 tweets about Mexicans, Christenson initially dodged. When another listener repeated the question she answered that she had been 26, but that research shows that your frontal lobe isn't fully developed until you're 25... or something. As the Space continued, Black web3 community member mec. kindly suggested that Christenson end the Space and take some time to genuinely reflect. As more Black speakers expressed that they felt hurt by Christenson's actions, the Space abruptly ended. Although the Space was being recorded, Christenson took down the recording shortly after.