Hoohacks 2022

We are two college students who came up with this idea after witnessing a scam in the NFT space happen right before our eyes. Multiple celebrity influencers were even involved, and as you can imagine, many people could not say no to buying into a project that promised amazing returns, even if they knew very little about it. Even though there was not a lot of credible information about the project, people still blindly placed their faith in it, and we saw at least a thousand people get scammed out of significant money. This is a surprisingly frequent occurence in the NFT space, where things move fast and it is some people's first time making a sizeable investement.

We noticed through this experience that although the technical details of NFT ownernship are decentralized, a lot of the aspects of making sense of investing in them suffer from being run in an authoritarian manner that suffers from poor incentives. The problem in the NFT space is that the community Discord becomes the final resting place of those who get banned and silenced by the project team members for having personally incriminating, truthful information about the project that may have saved many people from losing their hard-earned money. In addition, it is very hard to communicate credible information about the NFT through anywhere outside of the discord due to the lack of exposure and connection, the Discord is a very private community where possibly nefarious founders can ban anyone raising legitimate questions about the project. When banned from these servers, people often despair, knowing that they won’t be able to save the hundreds of, if not thousands of people from losing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars collectively in what is known as a “rug pull”.

What if there was a place where people could freely share information and freely gauge the sentiment of other members involved in the project. What if they could go to this place and make a real vote to sway the public’s opinion and provide hard evidence for or against the project? Such a place would surely facilitate the progress of Web 3.0, where power must be taken away from the centralized power mongers and into the hands of ordinary people looking to fall in love with a great concept.

“Stop the Rug” is a platform for the average citizen looking to bring accountability in the Wild West of the NFT space.