The first rug pull event occurred in the Blast ecosystem when the gambling and trading site RiskOnBlast vanished, taking with it approximately 420 ether raised from individual traders.
After raising more than $1 million from investors, the mysterious RiskOnBlast team sent almost $500,000 to ChangeNow, $360,000 to MEXC, and $187,000 to Bybit. A project vanished over the weekend in the much-hyped and well-funded Blast ecosystem, after retail traders contributed over 420 ether (ETH), or $1.3 million at current pricing.
An example of an exit scam is a rug pull, in which a group raises capital through token sales from investors and the general public, only to secretly shut down a short while later.
Prior to launch, Blast, an Ethereum layer-2 project, has raised more over $1 billion in funding in the previous few months.
Allegedly a gaming and trading platform, RiskOnBlast last week received over $1 million from investors in a seed round and competed in Blast’s Big Bang competition, with financing up for grabs if it placed first.
On Sunday, however, all of its social media profiles were deleted. The members of the team remained anonymous. The alleged pilfered money originated from more than 750 wallets, according to Onchain analyst @somaxbt. After then, about $500,000 was transmitted to the cryptocurrency exchange MEXC, $360,000 to ChangeNow, and $187,000 to Bybit.
In an earlier post, Blast described the project’s potential as “undeniable” on its official X handle. Although Blast has no direct control over projects operating on its blockchain, investors may view the social endorsement as proof of authenticity.
Market watchers criticised the lack of due diligence and reckless capital wagers on enterprises that seem to spin up overnight, while one investor claimed to have lost more than $12,500. Some saw the enthusiasm as an indication of a bull market, in which prices frequently soar and money is easily disbursed.
In the meantime, Blast announced in an X post on Saturday that it has selected 47 projects from a list of 3,000 submissions as the winners of its developer competition. In the upcoming months, these teams will get a set amount of financing that has not yet been determined to help develop an ecosystem on the new blockchain.