$1M presale on Blast potentially hit by RiskOnBlast’s inaugural rug pull

The disappearance of funds, website, and social media presence has raised suspicions about the RiskOnBlast project, a gambling platform built on the Blast layer-2 ecosystem. Arkham Intelligence reports that RiskOnBlast balances have dropped to zero as funds seem to have been drained on February 25th. The project had raised $1.25 million worth of Ether (ETH) for a presale token called RISK, but the team has since transferred funds in batches of Dai (DAI) to the noncustodial crypto exchange ChangeNOW. Etherscan has flagged the project’s address as a phishing scam, warning users to be cautious. Coinbase tech lead, Andrew Choi, and others have also alerted about the disappearance of the project’s website and social media presence. Blockchain sleuth, Amir Ormu, revealed that the RiskOnBlast team had used ChangeNOW as a mixer to launder $850,000 of the stolen funds and sent funds to the MEXC and Bybit exchanges. The crypto community has come together to track down the funds, with victims, including nonfungible token investor “MoonCat2878,” donating to blockchain sleuth ZachXBT. Another victim has reported losses of $10,000. The Blast team announced RiskOnBlast on February 12th, but concerns were raised due to the small team behind the project, whose identities were not disclosed. The Blast protocol, a scaling solution for Ethereum, has accumulated $2 billion in total value since its announcement but has faced bugs and controversy.