'SQUID' crypto a sham, plummets almost 99.99% in value within seconds

You don’t trust people because they are trustworthy. You do it because you have nothing else to rely on.

There was much hype, fanfare, and anticipation around Squid Game, the morbidly dystopian South Korean survival drama series that went on to become one of Netflix’s all-time mega-hits. After all, watching a few hundred cash-strapped, debt-ridden individuals playing a few simple, nostalgic childhood games with many deadly(literally!) twists to win a few billion dollars to emancipate themselves would make for a nice watch, right? 

Everyone thought so! What else would explain the maniac rise of the SQUID token, a “play-to-earn” crypto, which, in keeping with the show’s game theme, requires individuals to buy tokens to compete in online games, and earning furthermore tokens subject to their win, from a meager Rs 1,000 to almost Rs 3.45 lakhs, all in less than 100 hours? The crypto zoomed over 2,400 percent in just 24 hours, taking its market capitalisation to 174 million dollars, sky-high for a nascent cryptocurrency like it was. In fact, the coin, which started its pre-sale on October 20, was sold out in a single second! 

Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps it was. Only this time, all investors who survived and stayed invested till the end met a grisly financial fate.

SQUID rug pulls a fast one

In what can only be described as a textbook case of rug-pull, where developers abandon the project and siphon away all investor funds, the SQUID token nosedived by more than 99 percent, wiping off the entirety of its gains, peaking at as much as 2,861 dollars to crash-diving below 1 dollar in just a few seconds. 

This happened shortly after Twitter flagged the official account as suspicious, with just over 7 lakh subscribers as suspicious. Per Coinmarketcap, at the time of writing, the token still has an unverified, self-reported market cap of 1,802,875 dollars, down by almost 99.99 percent. Notably, the whitepaper and the official website of the token have vanished entirely. 

Per the site, “We have received multiple reports that the website and socials are no longer functional & the users are not able to sell this token in Pancakeswap. Please do your own due diligence and exercise extreme caution. This project, while clearly inspired by the Netflix show of the same name, is not affiliated with the official IP.” 

Scam in the making? 

While the token’s whitepaper had already detailed an “anti-dumping” technology, which prevents individuals from selling their coins if a certain set of conditions are not met, it seems like many in the crypto community had already sniffed a sham and were skeptical of it, pointing out many errors from the beginning, like the white-paper being ridden with typographical errors and the various background claims of the founders discovered to be misleading and deceptive. In fact, CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong had said that the token is “most likely a scam”.

Earlier, the Coinmarketcap website had issued a warning that stated that it had received multiple reports that the token holders found themselves unable to sell their SQUID tokens on Pancake Swap, the only well-known decentralised exchange to have listed it.