If you haven’t been living under a rock or hiding in solitude up in the mountains, you’ve most likely heard of the hit Korean Netflix series entitled Squid Game. The dystopian survival drama took the world by storm, and it was impossible to go anywhere on the internet without seeing posts about it in some form.
Games were developed based on the show and even a crypto token! Piggybacking on the South Korean series’ success, the play-to-earn crypto called SQUID was launched, and just like the show, it rose drastically. SQUID essentially followed Squid Games’ theme, meaning that interested people had to purchase the SQUID tokens to play and compete in various online games.
Players can then earn more tokens when they win, which is always a tempting offer to those who enjoy gaming. In just 24 hours, SQUID skyrocketed up to 2400%, turning its market capitalization into $174 million! This is pretty massive for nascent crypto like this was. SQUID had its pre-sale on October 20, and the coin was already sold out in a blink of an eye.
At this point, you might be thinking to yourself that this was just too good to be true. And perhaps you’re right because those investors who survived the games and stayed until the very end met a very gruesome fate… financially.
SQUID nosedived from as high as $2,861 to under $1 in just seconds in an unfortunate turn of events. Most people would describe this as a “rug-pull,” wherein developers decide to abandon a project and take all the funds from investors who entrusted their money to them. This massive collapse caused the token to crash by over 99%, completely depleting all of its gains.
This crash happened after Twitter flagged the official SQUID account as suspicious. To make matters worse, it seems that both the official website and whitepaper are gone, vanishing off the face of the internet. Coinmarketcap left a note or a warning on the site, stating there have been reports that both of SQUID’s website and socials “are no longer functional” and that the investors are unable to sell the toke via Pancakeswap.
This smells like a scam from a mile away, and it seems that many experts were already skeptical of it from the get-go. According to SQUID’s whitepaper, the token utilizes an “anti-dumping” technology that prevented investors from selling their coins unless they meet a certain set of conditions. Many in the cryptocurrency community pointed out that the token’s whitepaper had countless typographical errors and background claims about the founders that seemed very deceptive.
Even Bobby Ong, the co-founder of CoinGecko, straight up said that SQUID was “most likely a scam.”
