"That's why people tell you to be careful, don't play because you want to make a lot of money.
The excitement of Bitcoin Pizza Day turned to disappointment as memecoin publishers raked in over $200,000 in profits from pizza-related rug pulls on the 13th anniversary of what is considered the first commercial Bitcoin (BTC) transaction.
Through observation, there are 14 pizza-related memecoins released in the past 24 hours where four are confirmed as rug pulls while the other five are suspected to be honey pots* which means digital assets can only be sold to contract creators.
*Attackers use crypto wallets, tokens or smart contracts to lure unsuspecting users into investing, transferring or trading crypto tokens
The first memecoin was the pizza coin (PIZZA) which lasted only eight minutes before the developer changed the sales tax rate so that investors could not let go of their holdings, thus the 34 traders who bought PIZZA lost 0.9892 Ethereum (ETH) worth $1,800.
Not only that, investors who also bought tokens called pizza bitcoin and pizza inu ended up losing more than $12,000 in total.
Later, ethpizza and bpizza became the first to reach $40,000 to $100,000 market cap but both tokens unfortunately could not be sold after the contract owner stopped the transfer and sale.
There are various ways developers can rug pull projects, one of which is adding a modifiable sales tax to smart contracts that gives contract owners the ability to raise taxes so high that tokens cannot be sold.
Another, more commonly used alternative approach is for the owner of the smart contract to hold a majority of the tokens then wait for the price to rise before selling the tokens to newly formed liquidity from unsuspecting investors.
It is well known that Bitcoin Pizza Day which took place on May 22 yesterday started in 2010 when computer developer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,0000 BTC.
