Bored Bunny is one of the recent NFT projects that one would want to see as an example to avoid. It did bring in profits for most who actually minted one, but that’s not how NFT projects should be. From the Discord community management to the art reveal, it seemed more like a money-grab opportunity for the art makers and the team, who has been shady at every point.
Let’s begin with the idea and art. The website. This was all inspired by HAPEBEAST, which is an art with a proper roadmap, utility, and has much better quality with the imagery they have been already teasing. The website seemed like a copy, which was the first red flag. The community on Discord started growing at insane speeds with whitelisting happening too quickly, thanks to the easy initial ways and all you had to do was spam in the channel to reach a certain user level and get into the whitelist to be able to mint early.
How did so many people get interested in Bored Bunny while it was just another NFT project out there? The collaborations were showcased from time to time. Even the Opensea collection page mentions “The N°1 International Boxer Floyd Mayweather, The TOP 100 Youtuber David Dobrik”. Not just these two, but a certain follow from one of the celebrities was thrown in as news, creating FOMO among potential buyers who jumped in to buy one of these at triple or quadruple the mint price, not even knowing what the NFT is going to be, because the reveal was set for 8th January.
The whitelisting process was shady when they started the raffles. The number of people who were to be selected by the raffle kept changing, and the number of winners kept getting bigger, and potentially everyone who entered the raffle was then eligible to mint the Bored Bunny NFT. Now imagine this is the state of pre-sale, then what would happen during the public sale? There was nothing left for the public sale since everyone from the pre-sale minted all the NFTs.
For any NFT project, be it at any scale – things like the contract, the team members behind the project, everything is usually revealed days before the launch. There was nothing done here, and the contract was released at the last minute, giving no time for someone with the knowledge of reading it to even consider doing that because, by the time something fishy is noticed, the minting might have been completed on the other side.
The bigger story – Mod exposing the entire scam
Pukimon, one of the moderators who joined the Discord management team based on the chat I read and he shared on his detailed Twitter thread, he talked about how he didn’t like the way the core team was ignoring every legit question thrown at them, and whatever was asked was something a potential investor would ask too, nothing more than that.
The Jeff | Founder is still unknown, after the mint, after trading volume of over 6000 ETH on Opensea. Pukimon was promised a video of the team members and that was never shared. And just like how Pukimon mentioned in his thread, the founder was only behind numbers all the time. As soon as the mint time approached, every literal chat channel on the Discord server was closed and it isn’t opened after that.
19/12/21
Every project should value their Community as their no.1 priority
My personal principal –1) Team should be doxxed – provides assurance
2) Team should be transparent – filter out any possible red flags
3) Onboard the right members – valuable, aligned ethos & vision pic.twitter.com/veHLkAHeHJ
— Pukimon (@Pukimonnnn) January 5, 2022
Take a look at the announcements, the general chat section, you will only find posts from the founder talking about how they proved all those people wrong by selling so much, and what the floor price is, and how big are some sales in the collection already. No talk about the future vision, no talk about the plans on what to do next. Even to this point, it just seems as if they want to see the sales happening since the initial 2000 ETH they got from the mint is distributed among the team and probably the influencers who marketed this project were paid off too (or I hope they were). Now, the royalty that the designer gets is still another source for them to earn from the project when the sales keep happening on Opensea.
At one point, it seemed as if there was no art at all in hand because the reveal date was set a few days from the mint, and the Discord server had only the NFT Holder’s chat active because once you put your money into it, you surely would pray and hope for the value to go up, so you are not the one who would go negative against the project at any moment – so you are free to talk in that chat if you hold a Bored Bunny NFT.
Announcements in any such big-level communities would usually be about how they are planning to get this done next, and how they are moving to Step 2 of the roadmap, but here, the founder talks about proving someone wrong and the volume of ETH traded so far. All this, with the backing of the signed deals they have done with the celebrities and influencers whom they paid as a one-time investment.
The claims about this project being a scam or rug are something that we knew would come. In every big project there will be a small percentage of haters. We can’t wait to prove them wrong – Big things coming! For all the defame from websites and other baseless claims, our lawyers are on it. The fake rumours about Bored Bunny and what we are will soon stop!
Now, our floor price has nearly tripled in 3 days, the volume trade is over 4,200ETH, and we continue to add critical and long term holders to our project. Our BB holder community is highly invested in this project’s long term success, unique ownership continues to increase, and the team will continue delivering as promised!
We will keep working to bring this project to the top! we are finishing several deals with big names Stay tuned! 👀🚀
Even while writing this story, the price keeps jumping as the reveal of the Bored Bunny NFTs has just begun, and if you are in this, I sincerely suggest you exit the project, you won’t even realize when the floor drops dead and you are in loss. Owning an NFT is a perfectly good thing to do, but owning something only because it was marketed well and with no future vision, there is no bigger red flag than this. Look, I can still be wrong about this later if the founders decide to go with further tens of collaborations to keep this big level scam going, but personally, I won’t be invested in a money-grab business such as this.
