How to Avoid NFT Rug Pull Projects

NFTs have become very common nowadays as a lot of people are trying to get their hands on lucrative projects so as to make profit. NFT projects come with good utility to entice buyers to invest into the project. Without a solid utility, an NFT project cannot stand.

I'd like to begin this post with an example of a rug pull project that I was recently a victim of. The name of this project is MetaBunnies.

MetaBunnies was a project built on the Solana blockchain. The project offered staking of minted Bunnies to yield $CARROTS, which was said to be a multipurpose utility in the metaverse for MetaBunnies holders. Minting of bunnies began on the 12th of April, and I decided to mint one of these Bunnies.

After a week since the minting had been concluded, the creators of the project abandoned it. They left the discord server without any more update, and this left people in a state of confusion. My mind was already made up that the project had been rugged and there was nothing that could be done about it.

At that time, I was so eager to get my hands on this project because there was a rush for it among my team (comprising mostly of newbies) that I didn't bother to do my own research. I believe I can say that I trusted the sentiments of my team members. But I blame my involvement in a rug pull project fully on myself.

All these could have been avoided if I had done the necessary before thinking of minting a piece of this project. Among the necessary include:

Checking their social media pages to see if they were following and/or being followed by known and legit people and projects in the NFT space.
Checking their discord member count and comparing to the social media activities. The discord had about 15k members while the twitter account was struggling to make it to a thousand followers.
Checking if the project was fully doxxed. In this case, no member of the project was known. Everything about the project was shady, but I failed to realize it.

_{Discord count}

_{Twitter count}

Well, I don't really regret anything because the mint price was very little and this has also serverd as an addition to my experience in NFT projects. My advice to everyone would be to make proper research before getting themselves involved in whatsoever venture they want to thread into.

Thank you for reading.