Satoshi Nakamoto left a large pair of shoes to fill after releasing the code for Bitcoin (BTC) to the world, helping to establish the network, then vanishing without so much as a trace.
Over the years, the crypto ecosystem has seen many developers and protocol creators rise in stature to become crypto messiahs for faithful holders who eventually have their best-laid plans end in catastrophe when the protocol is hacked, rugged or abandoned by whimsical developers.
2022 is hardly halfway complete and the year has already seen a particularly bad stretch of good intentions gone awry, which have collectively helped plunge the market into bear-market territory. Here’s a closer look at each of these instances to help provide insight into how similar outcomes can be avoided in the future.
Some developers are anonymous for a reason
Satoshi may have successfully remained anonymous while launching Bitcoin, but in most instances since then, having anonymous developers has turned out to be a red flag.
Many anonymous developers cite personal safety reasons for taking this route. While this is a valid reason in some cases, sometimes anon developers are hiding from previous misdoings or pre-planning to cover their tracks in the case of future offenses.
A flagrant example of this was Squid Game (SQUID), a Netflix-show-inspired memecoin that rallied 45,000% within a few days after launch, only for traders to realize that they were unable to sell the tokens on any exchange.
Investors eventually discovered that all the developers were anonymous and all social media channels were blocked from comments.
The crypto community has grown to be rather distrustful of anonymous developers and this can be seen in the negative reaction to the revelation that the founder of the Azuki nonfungible token (NFT) project was involved with three other NFT projects that were ultimately abandoned, leaving their holders with little to show except worthless jpegs.
Another instance of an anonymous developer going rogue occurred in 2022 when it was…
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