Rug Radar

Recently I experienced a defining moment in my NFT journey, I actually learned from my past experience and managed to dodge a rugpull. Believe me, it was a proud moment.

I can't claim to have sniffed it out straight away, at one point I reached the stage of adjusting gas prices on MetaMask ready to click confirm on my purchase. Here I'll explain how I arrived at this situation and what warning signs I ultimately recognised that allowed me to protect my money.

There is a popular game floating round called The Wolf Game, it's a play to earn game that launched not too long ago and made quite a bit of noise for the rewards people were earning from it. The game is simple in concept, at mint you have either mint a Sheep or a Wolf, there is a 10% chance you mint a Wolf so there is quite a bit of demand for them. Floor prices went up quickly and a lot of people were feeling left behind.

The FOMO was off the charts, I couldn't believe I had missed another great opportunity so I went looking for the next Wolf Game. Usually in these instances there will be copies out pretty quick, as code is open source it doesn't take much for someone to create an exact replica so I scoured Twitter for the next one. I was surprised at how many there were so I followed a few and found one of the first to launch would be called Lions & Zebras.

The crappy logo should have been the first red flag.

Now this happened a few weeks ago but I thought it's worth mentioning. First of all the devs were completely anonymous, never a good start and the first red flag. I went to the Lions & Zebras discord and joined in the hype, the devs at first were very vocal and were building up peoples expectations. As everyone was aware there were a few issues with the Wolf Game contract that caused the whole project to pause and the lead developer "The Shepherd" to reach out to some of the best devs in the industry, this was my second red flag. Here was a game that had launched successfully and raked in plenty of ETH to be able to deal with any problems that arise and here they were desperately asking for help to get their project back on track.

I asked the Lions & Zebras devs if the problems had been fixed and they said they were, so I wondered how this Wolf Game clone was able to fix these problems so quickly? I still hung around in the server, bagged myself a spot on the whitelist (lucky me) and waited for release day. As the pre-sale approached a few people started asking questions about the issues that were fixed, obviously they wanted to know if they were investing in a dead end.

The lead mod reassured everyone that a developer would be on later in the evening to address all concerns, the deadline came and went with no sign of the dev. Deadlines were being missed and no information was being given, red flag number three.

The funniest part was launch night when probably about 15 minutes after the sale went live the whole team "went to bed", we were left with one moderator who had no information at all that kept saying they've been working hard and have gone to bed. Imagine working on a project then going to sleep 15 minutes after launch, it doesn't happen! By now the whole project was a giant red flag so I didn't buy in, that didn't stop many others though, I've just checked and 5,279 items have been minted in the collection. Incredible.

The following day I think most people had come to the realisation it was a rug, I think in total the team went missing for about 15 hours before someone came online and tried to calm the storm, it wasn't very effective but I had seen enough, I said a few words then left the server.

Although this happened a few weeks ago I think it's worth talking about as it shows some lessons I've learned and put into practice after falling victim to these things in the past. Hopefully it can help inform you on your next mint or at least improve your Rug Radar!