Coffeezilla has accused the company behind the Rabbit R1 of being “built on a scam”, claiming Rabbit Incorporation was previously named Cyber Manufacturing Co, which changed name two months before the launch of Rabbit R1.
According to the YouTuber, Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6 million in November 2021 for its “Next Generation NFT Project GAMA”. An archived version of GAMA’s website reveals it was a “decentralized organization that is sending 10K crew members into space to complete energy harnessing missions across the universe.”
Rabbit Incorporation’s CEO Jesse Lyu admitted in January that he had been involved with GAMA, describing it as a “fun little project.”
“My main work was to build an Unreal Engine 5 space station-themed game that I later open-sourced. Yes, GAMA released NFTs, and I bought a bunch myself just for fun. I never traded or released any tokens or crypto coins, and I left that project once the game was open,” Lyu wrote in a Discord message shared by Coffeezilla.
However, Coffeezilla accused Lyu of being rather serious about the NFT project.
The YouTuber played a Clubhouse recording of Lyu where he can be heard saying, “I don’t want to make GAMA, and none of us want to make GAMA as a hype and dump program. This is a legit team with millions of dollars of funding behind it. Basically, we’re dumping millions of monies into it just to make sure that it will be a next-level experience.”
In the Clubhouse recording, Lyu allegedly claims he will release “GAMA Coin” and that it “could become the first not only carbon neutral but actually carbon negative crypto 2.0 or Bitcoin 2.0”.
Coffeezilla points out that “he [Jesse Lyu] never released these tokens or crypto coins when that’s sort of what he promised. He told people he was going to release a carbon-negative Bitcoin 2.0.”
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Lyu apparently promised people on Clubhouse: “I better pay my money to collect your NFT back if you think this is just an NFT hype and dump project”.
However, Coffeezilla claims that those who invested in GAMA have not been refunded yet. The YouTuber estimates the refunds to be around $1 million.
Rabbit provided the following statement to Coffeezilla when he enquired about the NFT project and refund:
“There is no way to actually ‘refund’ an NFT unless the owner themselves agrees to ‘burn’ the NFTs on the blockchain. Again, we don’t agree with calling the GAMA project “abandoned” when it was open-sourced and given back to the community, in alignment with community feedback.
“This claim from Jesse you mentioned was taken out of context. The situation back then was there was a group of people trying to do malicious wash trading and reselling of their NFTs. To prevent that trend from escalating, Jesse decided to buy back the NFTs from these sellers to maintain the balance and order of the community and market.”
However, it’s unclear if Rabbit R1 was built using the funds obtained for the GAMA project. Coffeezilla draws similarities between the two, noting that the Rabbit R1 “promised the world and delivered on almost nothing.”
