Mysterious NFT Developer ‘Evil Ape’ Suddenly Disappears With Its $2.7 Million In Funds

A developer behind the NFT project, “Evil Ape,” mysteriously vanished on Friday. The NFT project’s official Twitter account and website disappeared last week, plus it snatched 798 ether cryptocurrency units worth $2.7 million, according to Vice.

Evolved Apes is described as, “The Evolved Apes Universe is a collection of 10000 unique NFTs trapped inside a lawless land. Fighting for survival, only the strongest ape will prevail.”

Evolved Apes went up for public sale on Sept. 24, and quickly raked in millions through the sale of over 4,000 NFTs. Then within a week, Evil Ape disappeared with $2.7 million in Ethereum and all online traces vanished.

https://twitter.com/ecgenc/status/1445443341487939588

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From Vice:

According to Mike_Cryptobull, who did not share their real name due to their standing in the community, the Evolved Apes community discovered that the social-media competition winners (a marketing activity to create buzz) hadn’t received their NFT prizes from the project, and the artist hadn’t been paid either. To figure out what was going on, investors active on the project’s Discord server jumped on a voice chat last week. In that call, they appointed Mike_Cryptobull, who spent 3 ether (around $10,200) on 20 Evolved Apes, as their de facto fact-finding mission leader.

“And through piecing the bits together I could find out and the parts that all aligned, I put together my opinion in the pdf for the community,” Mike_Cryptobull told Motherboard. His report contained some bad news about Evil Ape, the admin who controlled the project’s blockchain wallet.

“What has happened is that Evil Ape has washed his hands of the project taking away the wallet with all the ETH from minting that was to be used for everything, from paying the artist, paying out cash giveaways, paying for marketing, paying for rarity tools, developing the game and everything else in between,” he wrote in the report shared with his fellow investors.

Even though the money is gone, the Evolved Apes community plans to carry on. Unlike with cryptocurrencies, NFT rug pulls leave behind JPEGs and a narrative surrounding them. Mike_Cryptobull explained in the report that he and others would build a new project called Fight Back Apes out of the ashes of Evolved Apes. Evolved Apes holders would be automatically approved for a Fight Back Apes token linked with the art from the old project.

People ask, “What is an NFT?” An NFT is a non-fungible token or a digital asset such as a unique online art, videos, a house on the internet, a Nyan Cat meme or a Lindsay Lohan song.

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