We might have just witnessed the biggest rug in 2024
Investing early in Zkasino cost us over $33M
Official Telegram's gone, they dumped a massive amount of ETH on Lido, and the founders vanished.
Let’s break down the investigation
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For those of you who don’t know, @Zkasino_io is a crypto betting and gambling platform that was making waves recently
At first glance, Zkasino looked like any other GambleFi project.
They had announced $350 million valuation for its Series A round, backed by $26M from some of the biggest players, even @MEXC_Official
They even got Certik to audit their code, testnet seemed fine.
But turns out, founder @Derivatives_Ape swapped our bridged ETH for those $ZKAS tokens at TWICE the price anyone else could buy on @apeterminal. Extremely Shady.
Thing is, @Derivatives_Ape had a spotty history with @ZigZagExchange and @Syncus_Fi. Not rugs exactly, but still weird.
Then, ZigZag's founder Kedar Iyer calls out the ZKasino team for straight-up lying about using their funds for $ZKAS instead
This raised many suspicions about @ZKasino_io
But no one bat an eye on it after @Derivatives_Ape denied these allegations.
But more recently, @MEXC_Official announced that they would be cancelling the $ZKAS token listing without any explanation
This caused massive FUD as the token’s IDO was already cancelled on @apeterminal & @AITProtocol
In their Telegram’s investor chat, the team had already tried to downplay the FUD by saying it was only postponed
“The ZKasino network will still go live; it has been delayed due to exchange listings.”
But this was a lie.
Another distasteful thing, ZKasino first claimed that they were using tech like @zksync and @eigen_da in their bio. But they did not mention this at all in their documentation
They were using a simple Arbitum Nitro chain instead. Now that people called them out for it, they removed the tech it in their bio
