Recently, the ZKasino incident has also been making a lot of noise. Everyone is familiar with ZKasino. It was quite popular some time ago. It pledged Ethereum to obtain tokens, and the Matcha Exchange also wanted to be listed on the exchange. Because many players know that with this kind of staking, not only can they get the coins when the time comes, but they can also return their Ethereum, which is equivalent to free money.
But ZKasino gave the majority of enthusiasts a vivid moment. He collected 10,500 Ethereum worth more than 30 million US dollars and directly changed the rules. Instead of staking, it became a donation. Donation is equivalent to taking your Ethereum to exchange for his tokens. To put it bluntly, it is embezzling user assets. The incident escalated, and the project team directly closed Telegram, canceled the offline meeting in Dubai, and arbitrarily transferred user funds to Lido for staking. This move was really played in seconds.
Let's take a look at the cause of the incident. On April 19, many community users found that after the ZKasino staking activity ended, the ETH refund was delayed. Later, through the Wayback Machine, ZKasino deleted the sentence "Ethereum will be returned and can be bridged back" from the Bridge funds page on the official website on April 18, causing users to panic and question whether it was deliberately "taking the money and running away." Users who participated in the staking activity flocked to the ZKasino official Twitter to question, and Telegram also became a rights protection position, but it didn't take long for ZKasino team members to close Telegram's speaking rights.
On April 20, the MEXC trading platform, which originally planned to launch ZKasino (ZKAS) on the same day, announced that the launch and withdrawal of ZKAS will be postponed, and the recharge of ZKAS will be temporarily suspended. In response to the question of ZKasino's escape, the MEXC staff said that we are just one of the investors, and the project's behavior has nothing to do with us. As an investor, we are also victims.
It sounds good, and they distanced themselves from the matter after running away. They really think users are naive. Without the support of Matcha, I believe this fake project would not have been able to collect so much Ethereum. Do they think they are taking responsibility by distancing themselves from the matter now?
Things have been fermenting. After all, it is not easy to run away after raising so much money. The project owner also responded that there are many FUD rumors. The ZKasino network will continue to be launched. In fact, everyone does not care whether you go online or not. Even if you go online, it will be terrible. What everyone wants to see is whether you can get a refund? But the project owner keeps silent on this issue?
If you really believe it, then you are stupid. They used the funds to earn interest and told you that it would be launched as promised, then why didn't they explain how the pledge became a donation? Isn't this just a trick of replacing the prince with a cat to fool everyone?
In fact, this project is a fake packaged project, saying that it has zk technology, but the chain they released does not have zk technology at all, nor does it use EigenDA. This is an Arbitrum Nitro chain with a deployment time of 2 minutes. They deceived everyone with zero effort.
For ordinary investors, it may be easy to be deceived. After all, we don’t know much. But for Matcha, as an investor, even though they have a professional research team, they couldn’t find anything fishy. This can only mean that there is a big trick.
Someone dug out some information about a domestic person from the project party, and it turned out that he was born in the 2000s. The authenticity cannot be verified at present, and it may be a smokescreen released by the project party. From the current perspective, investors’ funds will definitely not be recovered?
After this incident, some people said that KOLs and investment institutions should not be held accountable, saying that they are also vulnerable groups. This is a bit ridiculous. Some KOLs may have some excuses, but do professional VCs like Matcha have no responsibility? If there were no platform and orders from him, do you think so many people would pledge? I believe that most people pledge not because of his technology, but because of who invested in him. So if you invest in him, you should do a good investigation. Instead of saying that you are a victim, you are done with it?
There are many projects on the market that exchange tokens for pledges, and Tong has participated in several of them. However, he did not invest in the ZKasino project after taking a look at it. He directly passed it up because there was no investment from well-known institutions. Moreover, this project is similar to Tugou, except that it was packaged by a technology company. Although there is Matcha, everyone understands it.
All in all, it is better to do staking projects within your means, rather than going all in as soon as it can be launched. If you encounter ZKasino, where staking directly becomes a donation, you will have no way to express your suffering, and you don’t even know who the project owner is. Where can you go to defend your rights?
