After launching less than a week ago, the NFT realm’s latest prodigy ‘Moonbirds’ is now in the firing line after a user appears to have won over 50 NFTs during its allowlist raffle.
In essence, the allowlist raffle determined who the 7,875 of the collection’s 10,000 assets would go to – with each raffle winner having the opportunity to mint a Moonbirds NFT for 2.5 ETH (with the collection’s floor now sitting at over 30 ETH).
Despite rumours of raffle manipulation being alleged, it appears that the project’s developers PROOF COLLECTIVE were at no fault other than the fact that their banning of 14,649 bots and sneaksters probably didn’t quite suffice. This is because, according to the notorious, pseudonymous crypto researcher Zachxbt, data from Etherescan shows that one user created more than 400 accounts to ‘sybil attack’ (i.e. when individuals/small groups act as large groups of individuals by creating multiple addresses) the raffle and increase their chances of winning – with the fruits of their tedious labour coming in the form of over 50 raffle wins (which, if all were minted at 2.5 ETH and sold for 30 ETH, would land them in at least 1375 ETH worth of profit).
Whilst the team has stated that they were diligent in taking down actual sneaksters (rather than false positives/legitimate users) by conducting manual checks, they have admitted that some ‘small scale cheating’ probably still occurred under the radar. This has led to disgruntled followers noting that they could have removed a lot more bots and illegitimate actors by ‘analysing the flow of funds and wallet activity’.
