FTX-Linked Project Serum Shilling Shitcoins on Twitter: Report

According to on-chain sleuth Zachxbt, the official Twitter account of the Solana-based decentralized finance project Serum, which had over 200,000 followers, has been renamed ‘Luka.’

The original Serum account is speculated to have been sold to a different user since all the previous tweets have been deleted.

• Sharing a screenshot of the account, ZachXBT revealed that its PFP avatar was replaced with Milady NFT and was used for promoting “shitcoins.”
• For the uninitiated, Serum was founded in August 2020 by a consortium that included the Solana Foundation as well as the now-collapsed Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and trading desk Alameda Research.
• Serum received funding from Multicoin Capital alongside FTX.com and FTX US.
• It was once heralded as a core decentralized exchange platform and liquidity provider for Solana’s DeFi ecosystem.
• The events leading up to FTX’s bankruptcy filing forced Solana DeFi projects like Raydium and Jupiter to cut off ties with Serum.
• Several exchanges such as Upbit and Binance, delisted Serum from their platforms. Soon after, the project’s native token – SRM – also lost over 98% of its value since its all-time high in September last year. It was assumed that the project ended.
• Subsequently, a community-driven fork of Serum’s V3 program was launched and rebranded as ‘OpenBook,’ which has over 5k followers on its Twitter account.