Founder Wallet Drained as He Exits

Just days after DeGods founder Frank (aka Rohun Vora) said he was stepping away from the CEO role, a total of 16 DeGods NFTs from his Solana wallet were sold into open marketplace bids—a move he confirmed came from an attacker via a compromised trading laptop.

The malicious actor was able to obtain more than 108 SOL, or nearly $19,000, for the stolen NFTs, which included a DeGod with a mythical helmet—one of the rarest traits in the collection. 

Some traders on X (formerly Twitter) were quick to suspect that Frank was selling off his DeGods assets after announcing his departure from the leadership position, with two other community members now running the project. But he told Decrypt that’s not true.

“Honestly, it’s just silly,” Frank told Decrypt on Thursday. “The headlines are obviously funny, but to be clear, I have zero intentions to sell any of my DeGods holdings and am honestly optimistic the team will cook.”

In a message shared to the DeGods Discord and reshared with Decrypt, the former CEO said he’s still trying to understand what exactly happened, but believes the issue was contained to one wallet.

“It could have been much, much worse,” he told Decrypt, adding that he’ll be redoing all his operational security after the incident. 

The public knew the now-hacked wallet address belonged to the DeGods founder as early as October, after it was shared by Frank himself as he began to receive substantial attention for his meme coin trading success.

And though he’s now lost 16 NFTs, he told Decrypt he has many more DeGods NFTs in other wallets—and that there were other potential ways to profit with that compromised wallet, further distancing himself from the conspiracy theories swirling on social media.

“If someone wanted to use that wallet to make money, there are way more efficient ways of doing that, like launching a coin or buying lowcaps to sell on copytraders,” he said. 

Frank shared another one of his Solana addresses that holds more than $50,000 worth of the DeGods Solana ecosystem token, DEGOD, reaffirming his commitment to the brand despite no longer holding the CEO status. 

In his stead, pseudonymous team members Pasta and Chill will run the project. 

“I’m excited to hand the reins to the team and watch them cook,” he posted on Monday. “Maybe we’ll look back at this fixation on ‘Frank DeGods’ as the thing that was holding us back.”

Frank resurfaced this week to announce his departure on X, but had previously disappeared for months from the social media site where he grew his following to more than 420,000 followers, last posting in February as speculation intensified around his meme coin trading and connections to other traders.

DeGods, which began as a NFT project on the Solana blockchain, blossomed into one of crypto’s most rabid communities, expanding its ecosystem to include a companion collection and Bitcoin Ordinals collection. The project even invested into a share of a team in Ice Cube’s BIG3 basketball league, back in 2022.

The brand dealt with controversy amid its decision to migrate blockchains multiple times, and was unable to escape the falling demand that has rocked all NFT projects in some form since the initial 2021-22 bull run faded. 

The collection held a floor price, or the lowest marketplace listing price, of more than $37,000 on Solana in 2023. It now sits at just over $1,000.

Edited by Andrew Hayward