Fees.wtf, a simple service that shows Ethereum users their lifetime spend on mainnet transactions by measuring gas, released its token WTF early this morning. Users plug in their wallet address on the website to see how much gas they’ve spent.
In the airdrop, users were to claim WTF tokens and a “Rekt” NFT, granting lifetime access to the premium version of the service. This cost 0.01 ETH, Coin Telegraph reported.
A wild start
The WTF token launch had a wild start. Reportedly, users lost thousands of dollars. A bot made away with 58 ETH, the equivalent of $187,000 at the time of writing.
Before the airdrop, fees.wtf announced that the initial launch would offer 100 million of WTF. Ideally, the circulating supply should have been the tokenomics’ main attraction, but it didn’t go as planned.
After bots conducted frantic trading in the opening hours, one bot disappeared with the huge amount of funds.
The repercussions
Social networks became rife with complaints from airdrop participants who had lost thousands of dollars in ETH. The WTF team released a statement two hours after the airdrop:
Immediately on launch there was only a tiny bit of liquidity and there were ape bots that were chucking in 100s of ETH into a pool with an ETH or two of liquidity. They also had high slippage and ended up being sandwiched by the other bots which essentially drained all their ETH.
In plain English, this means WTF developers’ poor liquidity pool management left the pool exposed. Due to the low liquidity, bots could manipulate the price of the WTF token and sold for WETH.
The bot stole from the liquidity providers, who were attempting to claim their WTF tokens and Rekt NFT as promised.
Ponzi scheme?
WTF’s price chart shows an initial spike reflecting bot activity, followed by a rapid loss in value. At the time of writing, WTF is trading for $0.12 and has lost 9% in the last 24 hours. One user ended up ‘exchanging’ $135,000 in ether for the amount of $0.01 in WTF.
Some Twitter users have labeled the airdrop and the project in general a Ponzi scheme. Referrers of the WTF project claim half of the fees to make it go viral. The WTF team gets 4% of each transfer. The whole team ‘earned’ just under half a million in token transfer fees in around 8 hours.
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