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

Jeff Opdyke (Jeffo)
4 min readNov 29, 2021

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…

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Jeff Opdyke (Jeffo)

Former Wall Street Journal writer living in Prague. Crypto and investing. Editor Global Intelligence Letter. Also on Substack: jeffoalpha.substack.com/