Blockverse : a rug pull ?

31 December, 2022

Blockverse, an unofficial NFT game inspired by Minecraft, appears to be one of the most recent scams in crypto. Blockverse raised over $1 million in just eight hours through the sale 10,000 NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens), which were priced at 0.05ETH ($127). Users didn't know they would lose their funds in a rug pull, a classic move in cryptoverse.

Rug pulls, which is a term that refers to when blockchain-based projects vanish with their funds, are a regular part of blockchain life. In 2021, approximately 3,300 projects pulled rug on their users, stealing $7 billion in investor's money. Rug pulling works in the same way as snake-oil salesmen did back in the day. They promise a product, but don't deliver it. Cue the charlatan running off with his dollar-marked bag. This was apparently done by Blockverse two days later. Blockverse disappeared its digital footprint, including website, Discord server and game server. The only link that connected users to their investment was their access-granting NFTs, which were also lost.

One of these 10,000 NFTs will grant access to the game's limited user pool upon its launch. These NFTs can also be traded because they are digital tokens. This means that a single account could have more than one access slip. Blockverse managed to pull off a major pre-order event, if it was a legitimate project. It sold the equivalent of 10,000 licenses. A digital pre-order game cost $127. Blockverse may have been forced to return partially due to a digital trail.

Game community members were able to locate a Coinbase address that was linked to the Blockverse founders. This address was used to fund most of the Blockverse's efforts. It also contained a Cloudflare IP. It would be sufficient for law enforcement (or anyone with less stellar intentions), to reach the founders' identities.

Blockverse's digital presence was closed three days ago. The paper trail leads had been distributed throughout the community. Three days later, the founders of the project took to Twitter to discuss the events. They first claimed that the project was legitimate and said that the flight was an attempt to protect their safety. They had several concerns about the Blockverse's elements, including the gas fees for NFT acquisition, the lack of player capacity at 10,000 players, and the lack of utility in $DIAMOND tokens, which they claimed were merely an access license.

The creators of FUD wrote on Twitter that "the fear, uncertainty, doubt" quickly turned into harassment, threats and doxxing. The team saw this and panicked. They deleted the discord server at will. To stop harassment from continuing, everything else was shut down. The plan was to reopen after everyone has calmed down.