Massive $33M Loss as Zkasino Founders Vanish After Suspected Rug Pull

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🧵👇

Many of my friends got hurt and I want to bring this to light. Please bookmark and share this so more people are aware.

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 explaination

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

To make matters worse, ZKasino had also initially announced that anyone could lock ETH and farm $ZKAS, and their ETH would be returned

However, after no approval whatso-ever, they decided to convert this ETH into $ZKAS at $500M FDV

They locked the funds and this was done at a horribly inflated price without anyone’s knowledge.

All ETH were then swapped to wstETH and sent to Lido for staking

https://etherscan.io/address/0x7911fea7b36fbd58a771bbf907aad2ef4bdcc491

This was the response of @XBT_Prometheus, a member of the team when he was confronted about the bridge -

Turns out, the founder of Zkasino, @Derivatives_Ape has already been doxxed and exposed. His name is Elham Nourzai

Elham and Prometheus are both speculated to be in Dubai right now

This is not a surprise since only last month the team announced they would be cancelling their @TOKEN2049 event there, another sketchy move

Not just this, @ZachXBT had already pointed out how sceptical the team was after they had failed to pay their dues

A deluge in Dubai cancelling ZKasino's event was one thing, but these accusations of mismanagement should’ve been a get-away

Now that it’s clear that this project is nothing short of a rugpull and a complete scam,

it’s important that law enforcement takes action against the owners.

The guilty should be punished.

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/arndxt_xo/status/1782372417736003605