Half of the presales on Solana turned out to be a scam

[Father]

About 50% of projects in the Solana network that used the token distribution model through pre-sales turned out to be fraudulent. This is reported by CoinDesk with reference to the Blockaid report.

Cybercriminals used social engineering techniques in Telegram, X, and Discord to trick users into interacting with malicious smart contracts or websites, experts said.

"[The criminals] are focused on both memecoins and existing projects. For example, it's only in the coming days that we've seen some of these groups [of scammers] target some of the most popular protocols," added Blockaid CEO Ben Nathan.

It is quite simple to conduct a pre-sale: the coin issuer publishes the address of the smart contract and offers to send cryptocurrency to it. It is assumed that after the fundraising is completed, senders will receive back the equivalent amount of the new token.

However, the combination of the ease of launching such campaigns and investors ' fear of missing out has led to an increase in fraud cases, according to Blockaid.

"The hype around memecoins is becoming more tempting for users and encourages them to look for new opportunities. This can lead to risks of interaction with intruders," said Nathan.

Earlier, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT estimated that 33 pre-sales of tokens worth almost $140 million were held on Solana from March 12 to March 20. Among them, the analyst identified several cases of fraud with total losses of approximately $4.4 million. He admitted that this is not a complete list.

In early April, the URF memecoin team disappeared with 2,400 SOL (~$450,000) collected during the coin's presale. Criminals turned the scheme in less than 24 hours after the launch of pre-sales.

At the time of writing, the activity of the SOL token itself has slowed slightly after its rapid growth in late 2023 and early 2024. The asset is trading at $173, having lost 6.7% over the week. Its capitalization is $77.4 billion.

Recall that in April, Solana faced a network congestion problem. The reason for the failure was the growing volume of transactions, including spam transfers. The co-founder of the blockchain, Anatoly Yakovenko, promised to make corrections to the protocol.

 

[Father]

"Cryptocurrency detective" under the pseudonym ZachXBT identified 12 memcoin projects issued on the Solana blockchain, which were abandoned by the founders almost immediately after the preliminary sale of assets. In other words, half of the projects launched per month are forgotten.

27 memcoin projects based on the Solana blockchain attracted about $112 million in investor assets over the past month. However, almost 50% of these promising projects that aroused the interest of crypto investors were immediately abandoned, and some did not release any tokens at all after the investment round.

Among the largest abandoned memcoin projects were LIKE, MOONKE, FROG, TEMPLE and SORRY, which were able to raise $2 million each. Other abandoned projects have raised between $1,400 and $180,000. Anonymous developer @Jared_eth was able to raise about $800,000 from investors for his project without launching a digital asset at all. At the same time, crypto investors were not confused by the fact that the @Jared_eth account in X has long been included in the list of compromised Web3 ROS security platform.

ZachXBT complains: the experience of pre-selling memcoins on Solana "didn't teach anyone anything" and a similar investment frenzy is taking place on the BASE blockchain, supported by the Coinbase crypto exchange.

Earlier, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko issued a warning that " pre-purchase of memcoins before the start of the project does not make any financial sense." He urged users not to give in to the hype and stop investing in pre-sales of memcoins.

On the eve of the founder of Cardano Charles Hoskinson (Charles Hoskinson) shared with subscribers in the social network X chat record, where he exposed a fraudster who tried to impersonate the co-founder of Solana Anatoly Yakovenko.