Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, wrote a post today stating that in different cultural circles, the same words may have different meanings. In this context, DAO refers to “project” and official refers to “scam,” which is intriguing.
In the operation of cryptocurrency protocols, there are generally two types of teams: “official teams” and those that develop through “decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).”
Official teams are usually composed of a group of professionals who work together to develop products, protocols, or ecosystems. The rules and decision-making processes of these teams are often opaque to ordinary users or token holders.
On the other hand, DAOs decentralize power to anyone willing to contribute effort to jointly operate the protocol. Currently, it is more common for DAOs to issue official governance tokens, and token holders can collectively decide the direction and measures of the protocol through voting. This is also the goal that the cryptocurrency community generally hopes to achieve for all projects.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out that DAO means “project” while official means “scam.” This seems to be a satire on the current cryptocurrency field, suggesting that if a project does not intend to become a DAO that allows the community to join, collaborate, share, and make decisions, it should not be called a “project.”
In contrast, certain protocols, due to the private interests of the founders or official teams, sacrifice the rights of users or token holders, behaving no differently from a “scam.”
Several projects have exited this year, resulting in investors losing their funds. The following are three recent cases:
In February, there was community feedback that the GambleFi project RiskOnBlast in the Layer2 network Blast ecosystem appeared to have conducted a Rug Pull. Its website and Twitter account are no longer accessible. According to Arkham data, RiskOnBlast raised a total of 420 ETH (approximately $1.56 million) during the fundraising period.
In March, an account with tens of thousands of followers on the community platform X, @VT_BNB, launched a meme coin called $Ents on the BSC chain, attracting a large number of community members to participate. They successfully raised funds of 20,000 BNB (approximately $11.85 million). However, shortly after the token listing, both the price of Ents plummeted and @VT_BNB, the project founder, disappeared.
In April, the decentralized gambling platform ZKasino was accused by the community and Dutch authorities of being a Rug Pull scam. It allegedly ran away with over 10,500 ETH from users (currently worth over $40 million). Although the official team promised to refund the assets on the 29th, investors only had 72 hours to apply for a refund, which caused community backlash.