After the price of its linked cryptocurrency plummeted to almost nothing, the developers behind a crypto project inspired by Netflix’s blockbuster show “Squid Game” announced they’d abandoned it.
The latest development demonstrates how volatile it is to invest in a new and popular cryptocurrency.
Despite a few red flags, such as grammatical and spelling errors in the project’s white paper and the fact that the project’s website was registered less than a month ago, Squid Game enjoyed rapid popularity, and the SQUID token was appreciated by more than 35,000% in just three days.
As of press time, the project’s official website and its Medium account were down, while Twitter had indefinitely suspended the account, alleging “suspicious activity.”
On Monday, Twitter user @__tricck pointed out that the creators of the Squid Game project had “rug pulled” SQUID holders.
A rug pull is a scenario that occurs when creators of a given project flee with investors’ money.
An address labeled as being “reported to have been involved in a rug pull” squandered SQUID coins and withdrew millions of dollars’ worth of BNB tokens, according to data from BscScan. Binance’s Binance Coin (BNB) is the native token of the Binance Smart Chain.
In the past 24 hours, prices for Squids on CoinMarketCap dropped by almost 99.99 percent to $0.002541.
The amount of volume traded has increased by more than 130 percent over the same time period, suggesting significant selling pressure.
The token can only be bought and sold on decentralized exchanges PancakeSwap and DoDOTwo of which are based on Binance’s Smart Chain.
On Monday, the project’s official Telegram channel said that its coders have decided to stop operating it because of the strain of dealing with frauds.
The popularity of the Netflix series has inspired numerous cryptocurrency projects, including Squid Game. However, none of them are officially affiliated with South Korean survival drama.
The prices of other tokens linked to the program, such as squid game protocol, squidgametoken, squidanomics, and worldwide squid games, were also severe in the red over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.