Blatant ‘Exit Scam’ And Gambling DApps Raise $43M In Ether
Presently, the largest Ethereum decentralized applications (DApps or dApps) by users and volume, FOMO3D, and PoWH3D, have raised $43M in ether, based on their recent contract balances.
Team JUST developed both of the DApps as a “tongue-in-cheek joke about the state of cryptocurrency as a whole.” Last week, the DApps have best a joint trading volume of about $85 million.
FOMO3D is a decentralized game with a very simple premise. Users can purchase more than one tokens (“keys”) with the use of ether and the ether used for the purchase is sent to a smart contract (“pot”).
Justo, the lead designer of the game noted that “The game was always going to be based on greed, but the marketing of it as an exit scam, and as a big theft in progress came much later”.
When questioned about how they hope will end at this point, he noted:
“Fomo3D is kind of designed to just get bigger, and bring in more people, and get bigger and bring in more people. I can’t pretend to tell you what will happen.”
With the structure and rules of the game, it can be seen that the number of ether in the smart contract will possibly increase. It would definitely be very fascinating to see how this entire situation will develop since it could likely end up locking additional ether.
“Welcome to a psychological social experiment in greed” the website states. “Come on buy a key, all the cool kids are doing it anyway”.
PoWH3D (“Proof of Weak Hands 3d”) is a “unique” cryptocurrency exchange which enables you to trade Ethereum for PED tokens.
Even though the game looks to be a very sure case of a pyramid plot at first glance, it is more complicated than it seems.
“In the case of a standard pyramid scheme, the first investors benefit the most heavily from the game as newer investors funnel money to the top. In a reverse pyramid scheme, the goal is upended to try to exponentially grow by trying to reward the newer investors the most. In our case, neither is true. We simply punish everyone.”
“The shape instead forms an hourglass with both sides fighting constantly. Call this an ‘Hourglass model’ if you must assign a title, at least that would be accurate,” its creator argues.
“The amount of ETH being put in is simply a reflection of how comfortable and easy it is for people to play these games, and how well we convey them. It’s a mixture of us marketing it well and the dApp space becoming fairly understandable, and open, and easy for people to join,” Justo said.
When a question regarding the teams plans for the future, they noted:
“The team just sits in a very peculiar place, where we simply cannot announce what we are doing, until we have completed it. The amount of theft in the ethereum space is staggering. Every single thing we do is so popular, so successful, that hundreds of individuals choose to copy paste what we have created and try to scam others with it. In a wild-west like ethereum, where open source is everything. We simply stopped giving out what we were working on next. Do we have plans? Absolutely.”
