This is possibly the most vivid example of life mimicking art in the history of cryptocurrencies. The Squid Game token launched last Tuesday, October 26th to try and capitalize on the name recognition of the most popular video streaming series in Netflix history. It’s important to note that the token was not legally affiliated or connected in any way to Netflix, nor the wildly popular Squid Game series produced in South Korea.
The premise of that show was that 456 people in life-crushing debt and financial despair were initially recruited and then voluntarily agreed to participate in six children’s games over a series of days for a large cash reward. The trick is that they were all drugged and transported to an unknown island, from which they couldn’t escape. Once they awoke and acclimated to their dystopian setting, they learned the basic rules and understood that losers of each round would be “eliminated.” They didn’t realize until after the first game of “red light, green light” – when half the players were gunned down on the playing field – that when the organizers said “eliminated,” they meant murdered in cold blood.
Sponsored
And so the series went – and so went the millions of invested funds in the Squid Game token, which were “eliminated” in less than a week. Since the Squid Game token debuted it saw a meteoric rise producing a 219,000% gain. However, it also saw a breathtaking drop to less than $0.005 in less than five minutes on Monday. Here’s the chart from CoinMarketCap.
Over the weekend, CoinMarketCap posted this red warning on the Squid Game token trading page:
“We have received multiple reports that the website and socials are no longer functional & the users are not able to sell this token in Pancakeswap. Please do your own due diligence and exercise extreme caution. This project, while clearly inspired by the Netflix show of the same name, is not affiliated with the official IP.”
It’s not clear if this was an orchestrated rug-pull or something else. It is crystal clear that thousands of investors lost millions of dollars that they’re unlikely to ever see again. In the Squid Game Netflix series, there was only one winner and everyone else was eliminated. Ironically, that seems to be the similar outcome in the Squid Game token version of real life mimicking art.
On The Flipside
- Typically when there’s a parabolic price spike within hours, without a commensurate fundamental reason or rationale, you can usually expect a similar type of drop.
Why You Should Care?
This has the classic signs of a rug pull where the developers seem to have ridden up the hype and then pulled the plug on the project. Take it as a cautionary tale against greed and getting rich quickly.
