Squid Game Token: The Rug Pull You Couldn't Escape

At 9:35 on the morning of 1 November 2021, London time, a crypto token called SQUID hit $2,861.80. It had started trading six days earlier at about a cent. At 9:40 it was worth $0.0007926, according to CoinMarketCap's own account of the collapse. Its creators had taken the money and gone. The website went dark and the team's last message on Telegram said it was quitting because it was "depressed from the scammers".

The token had nothing to do with Squid Game, Netflix's South Korean drama about debt-ridden people competing in deadly children's games, which had become the biggest series launch in the streaming service's history weeks earlier. It used the show's name and pictures without permission. The creators took an estimated $3.3 million to $3.4 million, according to The Motley Fool, Vice and Forkast. TRM Labs, a blockchain investigation firm, later linked the same people to two other schemes worth about $19.3 million in total. Five years later, nobody has been identified.

A game that was never played

SQUID launched on Binance Smart Chain, a crypto network run by the exchange Binance where creating a new token costs a few dollars and needs no approval, the equivalent of printing share certificates for a company that does not exist. It traded on PancakeSwap, an automated exchange on that network with no listing team and no checks on who is behind a token.

The pitch was a "play-to-earn" online game based on the show. Players would pay an entry fee in SQUID, 456 tokens for the first round in a nod to the show's 456 contestants, and win more by surviving rounds. The game was never released.

The trap was in the code. A token's rules are written in a smart contract, code that moves money by itself, like a vending machine. SQUID's contract let anyone buy, but selling required a second token, Marbles, which could only be earned by playing the game. Since there was no game, ordinary holders could not sell. The developers called it an "anti-dumping mechanism". It worked like a stock that anyone can buy but only the company's founders can sell.

Six days of headlines

Rising prices in a token nobody can sell are easy to engineer: buyers keep pushing the price up and nothing pushes it down. SQUID went from about a cent at launch on Tuesday 26 October to $4.42 within 72 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. Business and technology outlets ran stories about its rise, many of them without making clear that it had no link to Netflix. Each story brought more buyers.

Complaints arrived early. CoinMarketCap said it had received reports from users that they could not sell SQUID on PancakeSwap well before the crash.

On the last morning the price went near vertical: $38 at 6am, $90 at 7am, $181 at 8am, $523 at 9am, then $2,861.80 at 9:35. Trading volume barely moved, CoinMarketCap noted, which suggests the final spike was not driven by real buyers.

Five minutes

The money sat in a liquidity pool, the pot of tokens and BNB (Binance's own coin) that PancakeSwap uses to price trades, like a market maker's stock of shares and cash. On 1 November the creators sold their own huge holding of SQUID into that pool, emptying it of BNB. CoinDesk traced the sales to an address flagged by BscScan, the network's public record, as "reported to have been involved in a rug pull". That is where the term comes from: the people running the market pull the rug from under everyone standing on it.

Holders saw paper fortunes vanish. One buyer told CoinMarketCap he had put in $57, watched it grow to $14,000 and could not sell a single token. Another had bought 5,000 SQUID at $1: "I lost all of what I have in this project."

Following the money

TRM Labs published its investigation in January 2023. The creators swapped SQUID for BNB and pushed most of it through Tornado Cash, a "mixer" that pools many users' coins to break the trail, rather like changing marked banknotes in a crowded casino. On 1 November 2021 alone they made 55 deposits. The money was then moved to the Ethereum network through bridges, services that carry coins between networks.

TRM traced at least 2,693 ether, worth about $11.1 million at the time, to one crypto exchange with minimal identity checks, after a further round through Tornado Cash and the lending service Compound. It linked the SQUID team to two similar rug pulls and put the three schemes together at no less than 35,025 BNB, about $19.3 million. Data protection rules stopped TRM getting the account details that might have named the people behind them. Its conclusion: the clues had so far "proved insufficient to identify the culprits."

The US Treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash in August 2022 for laundering money for criminals including North Korea's Lazarus Group, then lifted the sanctions in March 2025 after a court ruled against it. Neither move touched the SQUID money.

Still dead, still copied

SQUID never came back. The contract still exists, along with the holdings of everyone who bought, worth effectively nothing. Copycats did return. When Netflix released the second season of Squid Game on 26 December 2024, a new SQUID token appeared within a day bearing signs of scam activity flagged by the blockchain security firm PeckShield, TRM reported. TRM counted at least ten other Squid and Dalmatian-themed tokens, none of which took off. The third and final season, in June 2025, brought more. None has been tied to the original team.