Derivative projects are something we’ve got used to in the NFT space, from ape to punk derivatives and now commonly Doodles derivatives, none of the stories may be as weird as the Squiggles NFT collection which minted yesterday for a whopping 1 Ethereum (dutch auction starting price). The collection minted for this high price, and since, we have seen a lot of drama on NFT Twitter revolving around the project.
The Start of Squiggles
Squiggles started out as a project which generated a large amount of hype in the NFT space. At the time of writing, they have 232,000 followers on Twitter, which grew at a rapid pace. Also, they currently have 360,000 members on Discord. The project drew clear comparisons to Doodles, a blue-chip NFT collection. It wasn’t the first derivative of Doodles that we have seen.
What stood out about Squiggles was the extremely high mint price, with their dutch auction starting at 1 ETH (around $3100 at time of writing), with the price continuously going down by 0.05 ETH every 10 minutes until the allocated NFTs had been sold. This caused immediate confusion and reports of the project being a cash grab or rug pull. Based on the price of each NFT and the fact that the collection was of 10,000 NFTs. Based on each NFT selling for the price of 1 ETH, the project will have pocketed over $3 million. This is from primary market sales alone.
Rumours of the project being a rug circulated after a 60-page report was published. The original document has since been deleted, but copies have been re-shared across Twitter. Within the document, it reported that the team behind Squiggles was behind many other ‘successful’ rug pull NFT projects before. The reported list is as follows: League of Sacred Devils, League of Divine Beings, Vault of Gems, Lucky Buddhas, Dirty Dogs, Sinful Souls and Faceless. It also revealed their real names, claiming that the team was made up of Gabriel Hay, Gavin Mayo and Ali Saghi, despite all of the team on the Squiggles website not revealing their true names. A copy of the full document which has been re-shared can be found here.
OpenSea Removal
The collection was removed from Opensea in the late hours of last night, which was first reported by Twitter user @Helloimmorgan, who’s a big name in the space. Squiggles posted on Twitter saying “Squiggles community is very strong We love you all. <3”. Then, the project was removed from the premier NFT platform. Then, no more than 20 minutes later, the Tweet was deleted.
In response to the removal, the team at Squiggles stated: “Hey Squiggles Community. We’re not sure what’s up with OpenSea at the Moment. The Team is Investigating and will get back with you guys shortly about this matter. But from what it’s looking like OpenSea has delisted all of our NFTs In our collection”. On Twitter, they are denying the rug allegations. They said: “Despite the claims of this project being a scam and rugpull, we are still here, working and navigating through all of this”.
They then guided fans of the collection to the upcoming NFT marketplace and OpenSea competitor, LooksRare. On here, the floor sits at 0.35 ETH. This is 0.65 ETH below the starting price of the Dutch Auction.
Outside of this OpenSea removal, there have also been some curious connections to the highly successful NFT project, Stoner Ape Club. The whole story was uncovered by @theycallmeshwaz on Twitter, who was in contact with one of the SAC founders to discuss their involvement with Squiggles.
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