The market for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, exploded last year, growing to an estimated $22bn. This opened up opportunities for many new talented artists and companies. At the same time many found an opportunity to scam the NFT buyers.
We came across one of the recently launched NFT projects “The Novatar” which brought a limited collection of 25K NFT avatars that can grow up on the blockchain and transform from a baby into an adult.
The idea and graphics seems excellent and the discord community has more than 100k members (mainly bots) however on investigating we came to know the dark side of the project.
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Sale without minting
The Novatar started the first sale of 25k at end of February 2022 on the website but managed to only sell 1500 NFT’s. The main reason for the disappointing sale was non-doxed team and non-transparent approach.
On the website there is no information regarding the team or the mint of NFT’s on opensea. When the user buy an NFT it only shows in the profile of the user on website and there is no minting information what so ever. We came to know from some of the early buyers: “The Novatar team only responded that minting will be done in future without giving any timeline.”
The team has now again started the “sale phases” of 20000 more NFT’s without minting the previously sold Novatars. There is no timeline on minting and sale phases doesn’t show anything on it.
When this issue got highlighted and more buyers asked the questions on mint date, the novatar team started banning the users from their discord server. Many of the buyers sent complaints to different online forums.
Legitimacy Audit
To the buyers rescue “Rug Pull Finder” a community that Investigates NFT Projects started checking the Legitimacy of Novatar project. They came up with some astonishing facts given below:
- CryptoDragons and TheNovatars website is a copy-paste. Both have same colour codes, same wording same everything, even the privacy policy and terms and conditions are same. Their contract wallets also found connection. However both denied any link when asked by the community members.
- TheNovatar blocked RPF from twitter and didn’t answer any of the raised questions.
Points to note very carefully
- TheNovatar team is not-doxed, hiding without any information.
- The articles in different blogs are paid, without giving the complete information to buyers.
- The community of 100k has more bots, very less real users. Online user count is always in thousands however the actual active users are very less.
- TheNovatar admins ban users on asking questions on their team or minting rights on opensea.
- After buying the Novatar at 0.11 eth (current sale price) you left with only a baby picture in profile, no information of mint, nothing on opensea.
- As per the shared information within community, the team will only allow mint after selling 20,000 novatars in 2 phases of sale. This information is not available on website and it looks like a dream considering they could only sale 1,700 since February 2022.
- Since the team is not doxed and there is no mint, they can safely run away with your precious money.
We do not advise you to invest in this project until the team is fully doxed and minting is done on opensea. Please do your own research, our aim is to protect time and money of as many people we can.
Don’t forget to share your feedback with us.