What happened
Evolved Apes was a 10,000-piece NFT collection on Ethereum that launched on 24 September 2021 and promised a fighting game. About a week after launch, the anonymous developer known as "Evil Ape" disappeared along with the project's Twitter account and website. According to Vice, 798 ETH (about $2.7 million at the time) from the mint and secondary-sale royalties was moved into private wallets instead of funding the project.
The sale contract (0x233a65b0…da1642) held buyers' mint payments with no escrow or refund path, and its owner-only withdraw sends the full balance to two hard-coded wallets, 80% to 0xD247C547…B11cb4 and 20% to 0x27699d9e…46D8E1. De.Fi's REKT database records the 798.07 ETH being split between external wallets in transactions 0x573da368…f803e9 and 0xa966f3a3…957be5. Holders then started a successor project, Fight Back Apes.
How it happened
- Buyers paid
mintPrice(0.08 ETH at deployment) per ticket throughdoPresaleordoPublic; the ETH stayed in the contract and buyers later calledclaimApesto mint their NFTs. - The contract has no escrow, vesting or refund logic. Its only way to send ETH out is the owner-only
withdraw, which pays 20% of the balance towallet2and the rest towallet1, both fixed in the constructor. - Vice reports that the mint and royalty proceeds, 798 ETH, ended up in private wallets, and De.Fi lists the two transactions that split 798.07 ETH between external wallets.
- The developer then took down the project's Twitter account and website, and the promised game was never delivered.
Protocol details
Evidence
- transaction EvolvedApes contract creation transaction etherscan.io
- transaction etherscan.io transaction 0x573d…03e9 etherscan.io
- transaction etherscan.io transaction 0xa966…7be5 etherscan.io
- address EvolvedApes (EVA) verified source code etherscan.io
- address etherscan.io address 0x233a…altx etherscan.io
- analysis Investors Spent Millions on 'Evolved Apes' NFTs. Then They Got Scammed. vice.com
- analysis Sourcify exact match for 0x233a65b06ef83ccf2fd58832086dd782f9da1642 on Ethereum repo.sourcify.dev
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