As the token price stuttered along with these revelations, insiders apparently decided to quit while they were ahead, and cashed out in a quick and coordinated sale.
Sharpei memecoin rug pulls for $3.4 million
A dog-themed memecoin project called Sharpei abruptly cashed out $3.4 million, tanking the token price by more than 96% in seconds. The project had been promoted by crypto influencers, but hit a snag when a pitch deck for the project leaked. The deck contained multiple lies, including claims to have hired multiple "KOLs" who later denied involvement, and false claims of partnerships with various platforms and projects.
AssangeDAO accused of rug pull after transferring treasury to German foundation
AssangeDAO was a project created to fundraise for the legal defense of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been fighting espionage and computer intrusion charges for over a decade, and who was imprisoned in the United Kingdom for several years. The DAO raised around $55 million, and when Assange reached a plea deal and was sentenced to time serve, around $10 million remained.
This $10 million was later sent to a German non-profit foundation called the Wau Holland Foundation, which has also been fundraising and managing funds relating to Assange's legal defense. However, this transfer raised serious concerns among some members of the DAO who say they've effectively been cut out of decisionmaking, that the funds were transferred without their approval, and allege the treasury was mismanaged and crashed in value as a result.
Hacktivist, bitcoin core developer, and AssangeDAO organizer Amir Taaki accused fellow AssangeDAO organizer: "Harry Halpin you should be honest and direct with the people here. You believe the money should be kept in a foundation controlled by your people with Julian. You do not respect the community or believe in the DAO."
Friend.tech team abandons project
The development team behind friend.tech has officially ditched the crypto-based social media project, which was (very) briefly hailed as a potential platform for influencers to earn money from their followers. It attracted crypto influencers, OnlyFans models, and a handful of more mainstream notables. Friend.tech received undisclosed seed funding from the crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.
The project spiked in popularity when it launched in August 2023, but interest rapidly dwindled. A token launched in May 2024 also suffered a mostly downward trajectory. On September 7, the team reassigned ownership and admin rights to the smart contracts to the burn address, making them permanently inaccessible.
Some denounced the project as a Ponzi scheme (repeating accusations it has received since its inception, based on its incentive structure). Others accused the development team of rug pulling and not delivering on their promises — accusations that intensified as one co-founder deleted his Twitter account and the other set his to private. The team is estimated to have made around $44 to $60 million in fees.
Trump-themed $DJT token rug-pulls, people blame Martin Shkreli or Barron Trump
Surprising just about no one, a wallet holding around 20% of the supply of the $DJT Trump-themed memecoin suddenly dumped its holdings, crashing the token price by around 90%. The token price had briefly spiked in June, when it was falsely reported that the token was "an official Trump token". However, the token's price had already dwindled since that time, and before the sudden dump.
People were quick to blame those behind the project, primarily "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli (who has been accused of dumping his own token before). Shkreli was quick to shift the blame to Donald Trump's youngest son, Barron, who he has also claimed is behind the token (although this has not been independently confirmed). However, the owner of the wallet that dumped its tokens is not definitively known.
ZKX decentralized exchange shuts down in what some VCs are describing as a rug pull
The Starknet-based decentralized exchange ZKX abruptly shuttered operations on July 30, with an announcement from founder Eduard Tur explaining that they had "been unable to find an economically viable path for the protocol."
ZKX had raised $4.5 million in seed funding from investors including the now-bankrupt Alameda Research, Starkware, HTX, Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, and HashKey Capital. The project had announced a second, $7.6 million raise only a few weeks before its shutdown.
People at Amber Group, ArkStream, and HashKey publicly criticized the lack of transparency from ZKX around its financial situation. Ye Su, a founding partner at ArkStream, explained that he felt they had been "rug pulled".
Blockchain sleuth zachxbt joined the VCs in characterizing the project as a rug, and further elaborated that he felt the retail investors who had purchased the project's token only weeks earlier had been tricked into buying a token by the project team, who "misled the community/retail ... by giving the appearance the project was healthy and strong when in reality they were in a bad position and about to shut down."
ETHTrustFund rug pulls for $2.2 million
The operators of a project called ETHTrustFund on Coinbase's Base layer-2 Ethereum blockchain have apparently rug-pulled the project. The ETHTrustFund project was a fork of the Olympus DAO project on Base, but there was months of inactivity on the project following its March launch. Then, on July 20, the developer deleted his Telegram and Twitter accounts and the project's website, and suddenly moved the project treasury to a new wallet. The funds were then laundered through Railgun and Tornado Cash.
- ETHTrustFund, Rekt [archive]
ZKasino rug pulls after raising $33 million
A project promising to build a decentralized casino managed to raise $33 million, despite an anonymous team that had exhibited several instances of shady behavior throughout ZKasino's development. The project promised that everyone who bridged ETH to their layer-2 chain would be able to receive their ETH back 1:1 in thirty days.
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.
$2 million emptied from Grand Base real world asset platform
Grand Base, a real world assets platform built on the Base layer-2 blockchain, has seen $2 million exit the platform in a hack or rug pull.
The team behind the project claimed that the deployer wallet had been compromised, allowing an attacker to drain the project's liquidity pool. Altogether, 615 ETH (~$2 million) was taken from the project.
Grand Base is a platform where users can trade "gAssets", which are crypto tokens that represent stocks in tech companies including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
MuskSwap and related projects exit scam for over $5 million
A person or group have raised funds for various crypto projects only to abandon them, empty the project wallets, and launder the funds through Tornado Cash. The largest of the projects was called "MuskSwap", which proclaimed: "$MUSK & MuskSwap was born to show admiration to elon musk's super projects like solarcity, tesla, space x and his constant influence on the world finance & the crypto market."
The project described itself as a DEX with a native $MUSK token, and launched in July 2021. However, the token tanked on December 25, 2021. Although the project team tried to blame the crash on "liquidity issues" and promised paths forward, they locked the project Telegram chat on March 11, 2022. On April 5, 2022, the team withdrew remaining funds and deleted the website.
Crypto analysis firm CertiK linked the MuskSwap project to several other scam tokens and projects: RocketDoge, InfinityGame, SpaceX, MUFC (themed after Manchester United), and Elona Musk. Altogether, the rug pulls have drawn in $5.1 million.
Project promising to rug pull raises almost $29,000
A project describing itself as "The world's first memecoin pre-announced as a rugpull" was explicit in its marketing: "do not buy this coin, as it will go to zero."
Despite that, people sent the creator over 8.8 ETH (almost $29,000) for the project's "pre-sale", even as they repeated on Twitter that the project was a scam and that no one should buy it.