Tragedy or rug-pull? Inside the collapse of a ‘charitable’ NFT project

Launched in November 2021, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Orica (ORI) held itself as an “ethical platform” benefitting artists, collectors, and charities alike. At the time, the organization was involved in prominent projects such as building a school in Uganda to aiding victims of human trafficking, to helping Ukraine. 

But less than two years later, the project’s founders have disappeared, and the marketplace’s user interface has gone offline. All that remains are the project’s charity efforts, which proved to be genuine, in tandem with allegations from disgruntled users that the developers orchestrated a rug-pull. In a new revelation, co-founder Danial Zey breaks his year-long silence, not only denying all allegations and insisting the project was ‘hacked,’ but also claims that the project is still ongoing. Cointelegraph investigates. 

An ICO amidst the bear market

According to initial coin offering (ICO) information site Cointotem, Orica ran a fundraiser from August 14 to September 14, 2021. It aimed to raise $3.1 million from the sale of its token, ORI. In its ICO, Orica promised to earmark 50% of the total supply of Ori for “NFT marketplace rewards.” 10% was supposed to be supplied to “advisors and partners,” 15% given to the team, and 25% sold to investors. At launch, the price of ORI rose to a peak of $3.638 per coin on August 21, 2021, then fell to $0.036 by October 1, 2022, based on data from Livecoinwatch. 

The token no longer has tangible value at the time of publication, and its communication channels appear to have gone cold. A former user, who wished to remain anonymous, told Cointelegraph that “[NFT] marketplace kind of dried out with not enough people using it and then very quickly everything went kind of offline including their website.”

The philanthropy that survived 

In late 2021, the firm partnered with Austrian charity project Bbanga to help build a school for children in Ssese Islands, Uganda. Bbanga commissioned German digital artist Mellowman to release Uganda-inspired digital art pieces as NFTs, which were then to be sold via Orica’s marketplace. The sale surpassed the $6,500 goal needed to construct the school.

A former Orica staff member, who wished to remain anonymous, told Cointelegraph that “the Uganda school received full payment as this was overseen by Sani, Founder of the Bbanga Project, who was working with Orica at the time.” The project released a video this June showcasing that some of the school’s buildings have already been built, including a main hall and library.

On December 21, 2021, charity group Hope for the Future also announced that it would be selling NFTs on Orica to fund its efforts. Hope for the Future is another Austrian-based non-profit that helps victims of human trafficking reintegrate into society after they are rescued from captivity. The charity continues to operate today. Its efforts to help Ukrainian artists also materialized in the REFUGE campaign that ran in March 2022. 

When prompted on the matter, the former Orica staff member said, “All artists were paid in full.” An amount close to $30,000 was raised in conjunction with Orica’s efforts to help Ukraine and processed by crypto donations processor The Giving Block. In one of the last statements before going cold, Zey wrote: “We donated 10% of the amount we ever made. Our main product is tech that is built to give to people.”

And the project that didn’t…

Despite official claims as to why the project went down, blockchain data and user complaints suggest irregularities. 

On May 11, 2022, the Polygon version of Orica was deployed as part of its migration from BNB Chain. This version had a total supply of just 84 million tokens, 16 million less than the original Orica token on BNB Chain. The Polygon version of ORI was a “liquidity generator” token with built-in liquidity provider and swap functions. It had the ability to call contracts on the decentralized exchange, Quickswap, which is a fork of Uniswap V2 on Polygon. 

On June 4, 2022, an Orica Discord server admin who goes by the name “Plem” told users the migration was complete. According to Plem, users had received tokens on the new chain equal to the ones they held on the previous chain.

Some users complained that they had not received their tokens. In response, the admin told them to add the new token contract in Metamask. If they did this and still did not see their tokens, they were asked to submit a support ticket. 

But the deployer on Polygon did not directly send tokens to users who held ORI on BNB. Instead, it transferred ownership to a separate account, which proceeded to sell nearly the entire supply of the coin…