New chain, new name service scam.****

Many new .(chainname) name service projects carry little to no functionality. Some are just outright cash grab scams.

It is typical when a new chain is deployed there is without fail at least two "Name Service" project are listed to capture the excitement and a chunk of the nearly airdropped governance tokens for the new chain. These usually have somewhere between a subset of ENS token to some with no functionality at all.

The worst example of this I've seen to date is that many "Layer Zero" / "OmniChain Domains". These projects give the implication that can move freely between chains, and also functional between chain. In other words you can hold one of these tokens on chain A and resolve addresses on chain B,C,D, etc. In additional to they do not have any functionality beyond this address resolution on blockchains. Unlike the original ENS project, they can not be used as domain names to point to websites, dapps, etc.

The worst offender to date would be @LZdomains. This project is a scam through and though, minting NFTs with no functionality, and immediately off-ramping every dollar via CEXs. Thanks to the craze around @LayerZero_Labs potentially having an airdrop this project has sold over $450,000 worth of garbage and pocketed the funds. Take a look for yourself at the @LZdomains minting contract: platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/entity/4d652cfa-d423-4097-9b6e-3304c2913227

Now here's the deployer contract draining every dollar out: platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/entity/7e1c8210-52dd-45ec-8b80-6281f2d5051c

I feel it’s safe to to say that they do not plan on using these funds to further the build the product promised, given it has almost all been drained to MEXC and Binance. 

The really unfortunate part of this scam is that it’s been blindly promoted by “CT influencers”  all promising free money from an airdrop, or just regurgitating information to post as content.

The more disappointing offenders are software wallet such as @BitKeepOS promoting this and similar scams. I would give them the benefit of the doubt and say that this is most likely just a feed aggregator blindly assembling lists using keywords and associations. However I still feel like it would be worth the one or two minutes to have an employee look over what they are sharing to their users before it’s pushed. 

This is far from the only “Omnichain Name Service” scam floating around, but unfortunately  I don’t have $450,000 lying around so I can stay in the rabbit hole all day exposing scams. 

If this was of value I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee though.

Notes:

1)  I reached out to @LZDomains for comment but have not yet heard back.