Investors lose $20.7 million in Bored Bunny NFT promoted by multiple celebrities

Popular blockchain detective Zachbxt has revealed details about a possible rug pull that occurred on the Bored Bunny NFT collection, leading to the loss of around $20.7 million.

According to Zachbxt, the project is a clear rug pull. His investigations reveal that the team behind it has been involved in other shady NFT projects in the past. 

But the past two, Ancient Cats Club and Crazy Camel, pale in value compared to this. The investigation also identified the three main people behind the project: Slavi Kutchoukov, Amir Adjaouti, and Remy Goma.

The Bored Bunny slow rug pull

The Bored Bunny NFT was announced in December 2021, with lots of promises. The developers claimed it to be a pfp project with 4999 NFT and a mint price of 0.4 ETH. The project became popular through marketing involving celebrities like Floyd Mayweather, Jake Paul, David Dobrik, DJ Khaled, French Montana, and Chantel Jeffries. 

4/ Here are all the marketing videos that were produced for BB:

French Montana:https://t.co/Aj5o8kpFgP

David Dobrik:https://t.co/1Of0hUw7XA

Chantel Jeffries:https://t.co/7fJKP61Ttv

Floyd Mayweather (Two times):https://t.co/CVoCxQLxmT https://t.co/PINwrN0nHn

— zachxbt (@zachxbt) March 31, 2022

The project launched with many promises and sold out within hours, with the team making 2000 ETH from primary sales alone. However, further analysis of the project by the pseudonymous bax1337 on Twitter revealed signs of insider trading.

Bax, who works with Convex Labs, discovered that before the actual reveal, a dev wallet bought the Celeb/Influencer NFTs. Following the first mint, the team launched another collection tagged Bored Bad Bunny NFT. This contained 1111 NFTs and minted for 0.4 ETH too. 

The third collection, Bored Mutant Bunny, came out a few days after. It had 3000 NFTs and went for 0.25 ETH. Unlike the first two, it didn’t sell out as people were beginning to question what the developers were doing.

The team’s undoing, however, was that most of the funds generated from minting went to multiple centralized exchanges such as Binance. A further look at the team’s history would reveal that they are not first-time offenders as they have been attached to other projects that had sour endings.

Bored Bunny denies wrongdoing

The official account of Bored Bunny has come out to deny this, claiming the reason for the lack of communication was due to receiving multiple emails. 

Hi Bored Bunny Members⁰
Hope you are all well, I come back to you to give you some news about myself and some explications about the project.

Primarily, the reason of my absence this last month was that I have been through a lot of the emails, messages in private.

1.

— BoredBunny (@BoredBunnyNFT) March 29, 2022

The team is now suggesting handing over the control of the project to a Discord Moderator, but the floor price of the project has fallen to 0.082 ETH on OpenSea.

Per data from Nansen, one in three NFT collections ends up as a “dead” project due to little to no trading activity. The trading activity of the Bored Bunny collection seems to have stalled following the developer’s shady activities.

However, the recent arrest of the masterminds behind the Frosties NFT rug pull opens a new frontier for investors looking to recoup their lost funds.