February was an interesting month of potential winners of the Rug of the month. An ex-pornstar made off with over $1 million on an NFT, Coinbase rugged a white-hat that saved them infinite dollars, and many of the standard scams occurred. It wasn’t until I saw the glory of this 3ETH butt plug that I knew we had a winner. Pixelmon NFT is the Rug of the Month for February 2022.
Pixelmon advertised itself as a play-to-earn game that was a mix of Pokemon and Skyrim. The project had an impressive roadmap that included a ‘catch-them-all’ Pokemon-type game that allowed trading of characters. Pixelmon’s devs had called it the “first AAA-quality game of the NFT space” that is a “play-to-earn open world RPG and a future blue-chip”.
The project raised $70 million after showing beautiful pixelated ‘sample’ game play. They set the initial mint at 3ETH ($10,000). Then after getting the money, the big reveal showed images that looked like a child made them in paint…and not in an endearing way.
(Want to get caught up? Read about previous winners $RUG (December ’21) and $WTF (January ‘22))
Runner-Up Rugs – Lana Rhoades & Coinbase
Before going deeper into February’s winner, I did want to give honorary shout-outs to the 2nd and 3rd place rugs.
Coinbase ‘Rugs’ a White Hat with an Offensive Bounty Amount
First up, Coinbase absolute rugged a white-hat who found a huge loophole in the new ‘Advanced Trading’ feature. (Note – a white-hat is a ‘hacker’ who identifies errors in code and helps fix it instead of exploiting it). You can read the full description of Coinbase paying their largest bounty ever here.
The issue is you could manually change the ID of the coin and trade coins you didn’t actually own. To test it, the white-hat (Tree_of_Alpha) traded 50 $BTC for 50 $SHIB successfully. That is trading $2,000,000 for $0.02. A black-hat could literally have drained all of Coinbase’s tokens and crashed the price of the crypto market.
For alerting Coinbase to this major, company-ending flaw, he got a full $250,000 bounty. For reference, identifying smaller bugs on small protocols can earn you 7-figures. Coinbase is over $35 Billion market cap and could have been bankrupted from this bug.
I realize this is far from a traditional rug, but it is such an offensively low bounty it certainly feels like a rug. Good job incentivizing future exploits being reported to you Coinbase.
Lana Rhoades Rugs her NFT
Lana Rhoades is an ex-adult film star, current IG and OnlyFans model, and the face of Cryptosis NFTs.
In what is likely not surprising news to anyone, after raising over $1 million Lana left the project. Her stated reason was ‘mental health’ because people were being mean to her on discord. Another ‘crypto e-thot influencer’ pulling the ‘mental health card’ then disappeared. She drained the wallet of all the money of course…You can say a lot about these gals, but you can’t question their ability to completely drain (you finish the punchline).
Lana had promised her…fans?… that the project would be a safe investment. All over the CryptoSis site it talks about future roadmaps, the value of the NFT would continue to grow, and Lana was in it for the long-haul.
Many fans (sure I guess we can stick to calling them fans) invested a huge portion of their savings (that weren’t already being paid to her through OnlyFans I assume) into the NFT project.
Honestly, this was a predictable rug. I guess sucking her fans dry $20 a month through OF was taking too long. Rug pulling an NFT just helped to prematurely finish the job.
This gets an honorable mention solely because the entire collections selling point was Lana’s involvement and future utility around Lana. And the weak justification that people on the internet being mean allows her to walk away with over $1 million. She is an ex-pornstar and current OF & IG model, like she didn’t know the internet can be mean.
Pixelmon NFT – The $70 million Rug
The winner of February’s Rug of the Month was Pixelmon. Pixelmon had an ambitious roadmap including a pixelized Pokémon-like game, a land project, and extra rewards to buyers of their first generation Pixelmon. Go check out the website linked above and the 3D pixelized monsters & ‘sample’ game play on their social media. It looks good.
There was a lot of hype around the project and the mint price was 3ETH (nearly $10,000 each). 3ETH is expensive for a mint, like 10-30x a typical mint price. Users purchased ‘eggs’ during the mint and had to wait for the big reveal. When users finally saw what they purchased, they were underwhelmed to say the least.
The characters objectively looked like trash. Many of the characters were on their sides and some were hiding nearly entirely in the grass. One minter even got an empty field and no character.
Raising $70 million is a lot of money for a game. To put it into perspective, here is a list of expensive video games. Games like Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, Fable, Gears of War, and Halo were made for less money even when adjusting for inflation.
Pixelmon Founder’s Response
After the community expressed outrage over the poor quality of their $10,000 jpegs, the founder of Pixelmon, Syberer, responded in discord.
He apologized and blamed the community for pushing for a reveal before the team was ready. He also promised to commit $2 million to get better NFTs designed to match the advertised game play.
His full response is below, taken from the thread by Cobie on Pixelmon.
The Pixelmon Rug Continues
Twitter account, Zachxbt who has broken other sketchy crypto behavior, has posted a link to the Pixelmon wallet and noted over 1,000 ETH has been transferred out to multiple wallets.
One of the wallets that received 400 ETH has used it to go on an NFT purchasing spree, including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), Azuki, and CloneX. The dev team confirmed it is one of their wallets. They claimed they are only purchasing the NFTs as the market dipped and its an investment for the community.
Although, you would think they could buy some of the below mint Pixelmon NFTs as a good investment, no? Nowhere on the roadmap was ‘using funds to speculate on other NFTs’ listed. It will be interesting to see if these are sold and the money returned to the Pixelmon Treasury.
That said, I mean I get buying the blue chips. Its not like anyone involved in Pixelmon claimed Pixelmon as the next blue chips and claimed it was actual financial advice…oh
Is the Pixelmon Founder Also a Known ‘Kickstarter’ Scammer?
The internet is searching more into the Pixelmon founder, Syberer, and some people have speculated he is a known Minecraft streamer who had previously raised 6 figures on Kickstarter only to never deliver anything.
Since the founder isn’t fully doxxed, this rumor is only twitter speculation as of now. (If you are interested in chasing all the leads, NFT Ethics dropped the breadcrumbs). However, if that is the case, it doesn’t look promising that this $70 million is going to be returned at any point.
Was the Pixelmon Artwork Developed by the Team?
It looks like most of Pixelmon’s art was purchased right off of Unity. They did this without telling the artists what their art was being used for.
Normally, buying art from freelancers wouldn’t be bad. But the founder had posted many times in the discord how they were paying for a team of artists, a 3D modeling team, and an animation team. Implying you have an in-house team of ex-Disney & Activision animators implied these were going to be top notch custom art.
There are a handful of twitter threads explaining why buying 3D animated artwork from Unity and attaching a voxel filter will lead to “dog doo’ unless you know what you are doing. Additionally, there is speculation the transformation work might have been outsourced on Fiverr or a similar site.
If Pixelmon raised over $70 million and only paid a few freelance artists from Unity and paid some manual transformation work from Fiverr…that is a lot of profit.
Wrap Up: Pixelmon NFT is The Rug Of the Month
There you have it. Pixelmon is the Rug of the Month for February due to:
- Raising $70+ Million selling NFTs for 3ETH ($10,000) each
- Promoting an in house team of artists, developers, and animators from Disney & Activision
- Showing beautifully rendered 3D pixelated worlds and characters on twitter
- Paying pittance to buy 3D models off freelance sites and outsourcing the transformation of the models to another freelance site (allegedly)
- Having the founder also be a known scammer (allegedly)
- Having the found explicitly tweet his project is a future blue chip and that it was financial advice
- The dev team spending 400ETH buying other NFTs despite Pixelmons being available 90% below mint price
One other fun fact before wrapping this post up. The Pixelmon webpage is only paid for through March, according to Twitter users. If these guys just let the webpage expire it would really add to the rugging. (ie- don’t even pay the the $10 to renew the domain and pretend the scam is continuing).
Till next month, stay safe out there Anon.
