Web3 is Going Just Great

Instead, the project's creators transferred those more than 10,500 ETH ($33 million) to Lido, an Ethereum staking service. As for the "return" of funds, the project team indeed followed through with their promises to return the crypto... except instead of ETH, depositors received the project's native token, ZKAS, which would vest over a period of 15 months. The project announced that they had calculated the ZKAS distribution based on a discounted rate, "as a favour to our users who have bridged to participate in the ecosystem". Gee, thanks!

One investor in the project wrote, "We made a mistake investing in Zkasino early. ... [I]t sounds like a scam, but 95% of crypto consists of such crap. With memecoins pumping every day, people believe this could be the next one."

It seems that ZKasino's creators have links to other crypto scams, including a failed "ZigZagExchange", which raised around $15 million that was allegedly misallocated to work on the ZKasino project. Crypto sleuth zachxbt had also described the team as "proven bad actors" in December, listing multiple instances in which they had avoided making promised payments.

After the rug pull, the project's planned IDO on Ape Terminal and AIT Launchpad were canceled, and MEXC (which had invested in the project's seed round) canceled the token listing.

According to Hong Kong police, they have received more than 2,600 complaints about JPEX, involving HK$1.6 billion (~US$204 million) in assets.

What he failed to mention is that the tokens in Trump's wallet were airdropped to him, likely without Trump even realizing it. Several of Trump's crypto wallets are publicly known, and people send coins and NFTs to them all the time. Trump has no more endorsed Stone's "MAGA Memecoin" than he has the "HarryPotterTrumpHomerSimpson777Inu" tokens that also sit in his crypto wallet.

Elsewhere, Stone disclosed, "My promotion of MAGAMemecoin is, of course, sponsored." I haven't been able to find where he has disclosed the amount he was paid for these promotions, as he is required to do.

Max Howell, the creator of tea.xyz (and creator of homebrew, though he's no longer involved), seemed apologetic, and promised to make changes to the protocol to stop this spammy behavior.

Now, deprived of that avenue, people are just creating massive waves of empty software packages, with nothing other than a "teafile" with their crypto wallet address for rewards, and submitting them to package managers like NPM and RubyGems.

This spam prompted a blog post from RubyGems, who wrote that they had to devote time to strengthening limits on package publishing and "ensuring [accounts] didn't disrupt the community further."

Security researchers at Phylum also wrote up the protocol's impact on the JavaScript world, which has seen as many as 7x as many packages published on NPM as previous daily averages. "Automated sustained spamming of this volume for months on end is rare and does nothing but cause heavy strain on the ecosystem itself, degrading the performance of the ecosystem for genuine users and straining open source security researchers," they wrote.

NGS and its associated business is believed to have pulled in around AU$62 million (US$42 million) from around 450 Australians.