Safereum- The Ironic Rug Pull of the ‘Safe Haven For Crypto Investors’

24 Oct 2023 by Rory Kejzerko 3 min read

‘Pump and dump’ Safereum becomes the latest crypto rug puller to bring shame to the DeFi space.

As many know by now, the joys of crypto and DeFi often come as a double-edged sword…

As whilst the decentralised nature of blockchain antics allows us to self-custody and trade our assets as we please, it also opens the doors for illicit actors to sweep-in and commit unethical acts whilst remaining anonymous.

Unfortunately, the latter scenario is something that we’ve come to witness in recent days by way of Safereum - a self-proclaimed ‘safe haven for crypto investors’ which ran-off with over $1 million worth of community investments after promising the world….

Safereum - What Was Promised

Launched at the start of October 2023 under the guise of ‘making decentralised memecoins great again,’ Safereum and its native $SAFEREUM token came with an intricate, holder-empowering tokenomics structure, as well as a roadmap that included third-party audits, CEX listings, and highly-optimistic daily volume and holder targets.

With a proficient social media team leading its X account (which has now been deleted), the project also ran frequent giveaways in a ploy to garner attention from onlooking crypto traders.

In turn, the project was able to reach some impressive feats in its first (and only) 2-3 weeks of activity, such as achieving a total value locked (TVL) of $74,500, as well as 24-hour trade volumes that were in the multiple-millions.

Such organic hype for the project - which promised to have longevity in mind - saw $SAFEREUM hit a max valuation of $0.00001738, with its founders later deciding to pull the rug at a valuation of around $0.000014 on Monday 23rd October (per CoinMarketCap).

Safereum’s Rug Pull: The Facts

In all, over 600 ETH (equivalent to around $1.27-$1.3 million) worth of SAFEREUM was dumped into the market on the day of the rug…which as you expect, saw its value plunge by 95% in within 24 hours, which further resulted in the token now being worth next to zilch.

Per data from Etherscan, the dumped funds were distributed across various wallets, therefore making them hard to trace. Most notably, the crypto-getaway included 2x35 ETH, 13x45 ETH, 1x56 ETH, and 1x61 ETH transactions, with the uniform nature of many of these perhaps indicating that founders and devs had pre-planned its pay-out structure.

In what many community members are calling an ‘exit scam,’ the mass sell-off of SAFEREUM tokens was followed by the deletion of the Safereum X account.

Additionally, blockchain security firms and analysts - including one of its supposed auditors CertiK - identified the event as a major rug pull. Such consensus was catalysed by the fact that the project had raised about $600,000 for a derivative token named Safepad - where post such fundraising, developers then allegedly went on to unlock and sell a significant amount of SAFEREUM tokens.

In adding even more controversy to proceedings, several crypto influencers - including notorious rug pull shiller ProTheDoge - were outed as Safereum promoters.

It seems the influencer ProTheDoge is back at it promoting scams as an official partner of the project.

This time it was Safereum which just rug pulled with 730+ ETH ($1.2M).

0x67c8423a7709aDB8ED31c04DcbB0C161637b807F pic.twitter.com/o5qi9rmC3e
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) October 23, 2023

That being said, we should also give a shoutout to Megabot, a nascent blockchain investigation tool that was able to predict Safereum’s unethical intentions before the rug was even pulled. Further, the project received a whole host of flack for its whistleblowing accusations, with many of these said to be from Safereum-sourced Twitter bots.

Dear Megabot community!
After finding red flags in the #SAFEREUM token, we posted this message to warn people and ask them to be more careful with their investments.
Now we have evidence and we are sure that this project will be fully rugged soon. As our bot predicted the $ILUM… pic.twitter.com/FO8aRq3KlS
— Megabot (@MegabotETH) October 15, 2023

The Safereum Rug Pull: Final Thoughts

Given that Safereum claimed to have been audited by 5 independent companies, this rug pull is another example of how words often mean nothing… and that it’s always best to directly verify with third-party auditors that audits have actually been carried out.

Such safeguarding measure - as well as a whole host of others when it comes to protecting yourself from rug pulls and pump and dumps - can be explored more extensively in this article.

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