research-article

Miracle or Mirage? A Measurement Study of NFT Rug Pulls

Authors:

Haoyu WangAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, Volume 7, Issue 3

Article No.: 51, Pages 1 - 25

https://doi.org/10.1145/3626782

Published: 12 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

NFT rug pull is one of the most prominent type of NFT scam, whose definition is that the developers of an NFT project abandon it and run away with investors' funds. Although they have drawn attention from our community, to the best of our knowledge, the NFT rug pulls have not been systematically measured. To fill the void, this paper presents the first in-depth measurement study of NFT rug pulls. Specifically, we first compile a list of 253 known NFT rug pulls as our initial confirmed rug pulls (i.e., ground truth), based on which we perform a pilot study, highlighting the key symptoms of NFT rug pulls. Then, we design an effective rule-based detector to measure the prevalence of NFT rug pulls in the ecosystem. We have labelled 7,487 happened NFT rug pull projects which were not revealed by our community. To eliminate the potential damage brought by rug pull scams, we take a step further towards designing a real-time prediction model to proactively identify the potential rug pull projects in an early stage ahead of the scam happens. We have implemented a prototype system, and deployed it in the real-world setting for over 6 months. Our system has raised alarms for 5,557 new NFT projects by the time of this writing, which works as a whistle blower that pinpoints rug pull scams timely, thus mitigating the impacts.

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Cited By

Gehrlein RDengel A(2024)Blockchain Technology in K-12 Computer Science Education?!Informatics10.3390/informatics1104007911:4(79)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics11040079
Huang YLin YHe T(2024)Optimized Cross-Path Attacks via Adversarial ReconnaissanceACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3673660.365507552:1(51-52)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3673660.3655075
Huang JHe NMa KXiao JWang H(2024)Miracle or Mirage? A Measurement Study of NFT Rug PullsACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3673660.365506652:1(87-88)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3673660.3655066
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Miracle or Mirage? A Measurement Study of NFT Rug Pulls
1. Security and privacy
  1. Intrusion/anomaly detection and malware mitigation

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Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems

Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems Volume 7, Issue 3

POMACS

December 2023

599 pages

EISSN:2476-1249

DOI:10.1145/3637453

Editors:
Augustin Chaintreau
Columbia University
,
Leana Golubchik
University of Southern California, United States
,
Zhi-Li Zhang
University of Minnesota, United States

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Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 12 December 2023

Published in POMACS Volume 7, Issue 3

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Cited By

Gehrlein RDengel A(2024)Blockchain Technology in K-12 Computer Science Education?!Informatics10.3390/informatics1104007911:4(79)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics11040079
Huang YLin YHe T(2024)Optimized Cross-Path Attacks via Adversarial ReconnaissanceACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3673660.365507552:1(51-52)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3673660.3655075
Huang JHe NMa KXiao JWang H(2024)Miracle or Mirage? A Measurement Study of NFT Rug PullsACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3673660.365506652:1(87-88)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3673660.3655066
Huang YLin YHe TGaretto MMarin ACiucu FFanti GRighter R(2024)Optimized Cross-Path Attacks via Adversarial ReconnaissanceAbstracts of the 2024 ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems10.1145/3652963.3655075(51-52)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652963.3655075
Huang JHe NMa KXiao JWang HGaretto MMarin ACiucu FFanti GRighter R(2024)Miracle or Mirage? A Measurement Study of NFT Rug PullsAbstracts of the 2024 ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems10.1145/3652963.3655066(87-88)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3652963.3655066
Huang JXia PLi JMa KTyson GLuo XWu LZhou YCai WWang HChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Unveiling the Paradox of NFT ProsperityProceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645566(167-177)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1145/3589334.3645566
Yang JLiu JLin DWu JHuang BLi QZheng Z(2024)Who Stole My NFT? Investigating Web3 NFT Phishing Scams on EthereumIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2024.346354119(9301-9314)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2024.3463541
Sechting CRaschke P(2024)A Taxonomy of Anti-Fraud Measures within Token Economy: Insights from Rug Pull Schemes2024 6th Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services (BRAINS)10.1109/BRAINS63024.2024.10732222(1-9)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/BRAINS63024.2024.10732222

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