Good day everyone,
I hope you are all well and have had an excellent week so far, welcome to CryptoGod-1's blog on all things crypto. Today I will be doing a look back at one of the biggest and most elaborate hoaxes to have taken hold within the crypto space; Squid Coin.
What Was Squid Coin
Back in late 2021 the world was becoming hooked by the Netflix series Squid Game, a South Korean show. This is close to the time when Bitcoin and Ethereum were posting new all time highs, and the crypto space was on fire. Like with all things which trend globally, a group or person within the crypto space saw the opportunity associated with the popularity of the show and took their chance. SQUID, a token on the Binance Smart Chain, was created. It was in no way affiliated or associated with the popular Netflix series, but gained its own traction purely through the name association with the show. The project was created in mid September and the token was launched on the 26th of October 2021, with their own whitepaper and website.
How it was a Scam
When the project and then token were launched, the initial feedback from investor's was positive. That is of course the more clueless and degenerative investors among us. The project's whitepaper highlighted how the concept was to create a "crypto play to earn platform” that worked around a game similar to the one in the series. The main difference was this Squid Game would not require anybody to put their life on the line. Investors could buy in and enter the lowest tier of the project for a minimum of 497 Squid Tokens. There would be no limit to the rewards which could be earnt, and if anybody was not into gaming they were pressed to buy into it as an investment. This is the point where seasoned investors were quick to identify it as a scam through its obvious tokenomics, meme like status, and websites which were only being registered one month prior. The aforementioned whitepaper was also full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but we all know so many people invest without even reading these things.
So, the token was listed on Pancakeswap and it began with a price of roughly $0.02 thanks to the small amount of liquidity put into it. Over the weekend, the price of $SQUID soared up towards $38 as gamblers jumped in sensing an opportunity. From there it seemed unstoppable, as the following Monday, November the 1st 2021, the price had gone from from less than $0.02 to a peak of over $2,860 and even recorded at $3,100 by some, a mere six days after its launch. Amazing returns of around 143,000x.
So how was it a scam? Great returns, everyone is a winner right? Wrong. That same day, November the 1st 2021, the token went back to trading for less the $0.01 after the founder had flooded the market by selling off all of their holdings and abandoning the project. Rug completely and effectively pulled. It was so rapid that a Twitch streamer even managed to capture the rug live, as you can see below.
Apparently the founder made around $3 million from their token sale, and they messaged the Telegram group stating they had abandoned the project "due to scammers", as per their message below:
“Someone is trying to hack our project these days. Not only the Twitter account but also our smart contract… Squid Game Dev does not want to continue running the project as we are depressed from the scammers and overwhelmed with stress.”
At the same time around 40,000 or more investor's that still held the token, according to BscScan, a blockchain search engine and analytics platform. Nobody could withdraw their tokens and a its creators were never determined. The website was taken offline. Emails sent to the developers bounced. The social media channels were shut down. The Twitter account turned off direct messaging and replies. BscScan managed to identify some of the wallets associated with the scam, with one of them swapping $3.38 million worth of Squid into BNB and then sent it tornado. Never to be seen again.
The remaining investors were left with a token worth nothing and a valuable lesson in how a "rug pull can" happen.
Where is Squid Coin 12 Months Later?
As with many tokens which were initially created as a scam and abandoned by the original team behind it, $Squid is still alive. In name at least. t is now completely uncontrolled and is nothing more than a community token passed around for random speculative trades. The live $Squid price at the time of checking, 26th of October 2022, is $0.007886 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $148,228 USD. A steep drop off from where it began and soared towards 12 months ago. There has been some interest in the coin of late among traders, with some even speculating the the one year anniversary will lead to a big gain. It remains to be seen, but November the 1st could see a nice return for some if the coin does indeed rise even above the $0.01 or $0.02 price levels.
The chart below shows the price of $Squid for the Year to Date so far, as the value has steadily dropped. The chart was gotten on Coinmarketcap.com
Below I have shown a contrast for the all time chart, and it is on this one that people can get a real idea of how much damage was caused by the rug pull. While the chart above seems like any old coin just enduring the bear market, the chart below really shows how the coin effectively died from what its creator did. Again, this chart was gotten on Coinmarketcap.com
I hope you enjoyed looking back at what was at the time one of the more obvious scams, yet also one of the most successful ones, within the Crypto space. If you are interested in learning about some of the biggest scams which have taken place in the crypto space, check out my post about them here: Blockchain DeFi Based Scams
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
Referral links:
Publish0x - https://www.publish0x.com/?a=olejZqrzej
Splinterlands - https://splinterlands.com?ref=rnabc1
Upland - r.upland.me/NQAH
Binance - https://accounts.binance.com/en/register?ref=143611368
NFT Market Sales
OpenSea - https://opensea.io/RNabc
Follow Me :)
Twitter - @RNabc123
