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RiskOnBlast was endorsed by the official Blast ecosystem’s X account, terming its potential as “undeniable”.
Retailers on the Blast ecosystem suffered a blow and the first scam on the network after a reported rug pull worth over $1.3M ETH by the “RiskOnBlast” project. Blast, developed by the team behind the NFT platform Blur, is an Ethereum L2 solution that aims to compete with Arbitrum, Optimism and Starknet. The L2 new entrant was scheduled to go live in February but has already hit $2 billion in TVL, as per DefiLlama.
The RiskOnBlast project, fronted as a gambling and exchange platform, was one of the top contenders on Blast’s massive Blast Big Bang competition and was set to receive some funding. The project raised $1 million from investors as a seed round the previous week and was endorsed by the official Blast ecosystem X account, terming its potential as “undeniable”.
However, the “RiskOnBlast” deactivated its socials over the weekend and reportedly scammed +400 ETH from over 750 retailers, according to an X pseudonymous web3 frauds researcher, SomaXBT. The stolen assets translated to over $1.26 million based on current ETH market prices.
1.@Riskonblast rugged 420 ETH worth $1.25 million from 750+ victims.
Scammers lent $497k through @ChangeNOW_io , $360k through @MEXC_Official and $187k through @Bybit_Official exchange
contract on L1
0x25f8C342E430C85829Ef5021C0720f0c60969840. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/XK2w2gTo8X
— SomaXBT (@somaxbt) February 25, 2024
The stolen funds were moved to a couple of exchanges. According to data from Arkham Intelligence, the funds were transferred to ChangeNow, ByBit, MEXC and SideShift.
Market watchers quickly pointed out that the RiskOnBlast project team was anonymous. However, Blast’s social support and green light on the project didn’t augur nicely with watchers. Some watchers opined that the endorsement and subsequent terming of the project’s potential as “undeniable” misled retailers.
Others outrightly called out influencers on the Blast ecosystem to do due diligence before pushing projects to their community. The unfortunate development could spook other retailers eyeing other projects across the Blast Ecosystem that span decentralized exchanges to lending protocols, especially the projects that were part of Blast’s Big Bang competition.
How Blast-linked Assets Reacted
Despite the negative development, Ethereum recorded a weekend pump, tipping ETH price to jump to $3.1K as per CoinMarketCap. ETH price pump could be linked to recent whale interests.
However, a look at BLUR, the native token to the NFT aggregator and marketplace Blur, which shares the same developer team as Blast, showed sharp retracement at the time of writing. The token was down over 2% in the past 24 hours.
As the February deadline inches closer, it remains to be seen whether the Blast ecosystem mainnet will go live or respond to the “RiskOnBlast” scam. But this is another stark reminder to users to always dive deep into new projects to ascertain their risk profiles before further engagement.
