Bank Box: Anatomy of a Rug — and a Sociopath.

And in the end … it was a rug.

I am talking about SolanaBankBox, the NFT project that promised to pay out SOL monthly to holders of four different bank boxes.

Bank Box minted on Sunday, Nov. 28, and immediately worries mounted. I minted two (one for me; one for my landlord) and both were the supposedly super-rare Alien Boxes. That’s uncanny luck … or a sign of something bad.

The Discord chat took forever to reopen, and when it did it was clear that everyone was minting the two rarest of four different Bank Boxes — Alien and Zombie boxes. Clearly, that shouldn’t happen.

Moreover, non-whitelisted buyers were able to mint as well. Hmmmm…

I remained silent in the various Discord chats where everyone was jabbering about “rug this” and “rug that.” I wanted to hear what the team had to say before jumping to any conclusions. The founder popped up in the Bank Box Discord chat to offer his apologies. Something had gone wrong with the smart contact. It minted the wrong boxes in the wrong order. The team had a plan. It would burn all remaining boxes for the upcoming public mint and honor the payouts for the newly minted boxes for November and December, before figuring a new plan for January.

He sought to allay fears. He promised to rebuild trust with the SolanaBankBox community. He kept the Discord chat open, even though the Mods were clueless, too, and had no answers to offer. @SolanaBankBox remained an active Twitter account.

Typically, in a rug, Discord and Twitter vanish immediately.

In short, the founder is a f***ing sociopath.

He not only created a sharp website with a plausible roadmap, he explained exactly how the funding would work for the first six months, and the plans the team was working on for the post-six-month’s income requirements. And then — and then! — instead of just running away with the money, like most common scum, he tried to quell fears by promising to rebuild trust with the community and to honor the benefits of the boxes that were minted.

I even had a conversation with him after I published my first story. He made comments, unprovoked, about thinking the project “could really change lives.” Guess he was right — only from an entirely different perspective than mine.

That’s some high-level sociopathy. (For the record, I do not get paid for what I…