Hashmasks Mania: A $10M Sellout, and the Counterfeit Token That Rode Its Wave

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Within days of launch, all 16,384 individually generated Hashmask cards had sold out, together fetching roughly 7,300 ETH — near $10 million at the time. Each card combines five randomly assigned traits — character, object, mask, skin colour, and eye colour — with its own rarity weighting behind each one.

Resale prices moved just as fast. Cards that had gone for 0.1 ETH at launch were changing hands three days later for as much as 97 ETH. The project's own site hints at a gamified layer to the collection, yet no such game had materialized as of that observation.

Segments of the crypto space tend to spiral inward instead of expanding outward: fresh projects keep appearing, each one a niche carved out of another niche, meaningless to anyone outside that particular circle but taken seriously by its members — some of whom may genuinely be tracking something bigger, others simply numbed by repetition within their own echo chamber. Accounts with large followings routinely push these projects straight into their audiences at speed, whipping up enough FOMO to fog judgment and strip away caution. Under that kind of pressure, a product barely functional enough to be called a product can still pull in enormous sums of money and attention, provided greed is doing the driving.

Hype of that kind draws con artists as reliably as it draws genuine buyers, and Hashmasks proved no exception.

Crypto art in general appears to be pulling in far more speculators chasing returns than collectors chasing aesthetics, and Hashmasks fits that pattern — with the added wrinkle that some of those speculators weren't playing straight.

Mariano (@nanexcool) warned the community about a counterfeit Hashmask token, having watched its rug pull unfold live. We put some questions to him afterward.

rekt: Hey Mariano — thanks for taking the time to chat.

Mariano: Hey! What's up rekt frog!!!

rekt: We wanted to follow up on that counterfeit Hashmask token scam you flagged earlier — what's your take on how it unfolded? Word around is the person behind it barely came away with anything; some estimates put the haul at just 16 ETH?

Mariano: Yeah, it was very little profit in the end... It was 4am for me and I was tweeting fast. After the tweets I noticed most of the liquidity had been provided by the scammer themselves.

I got excited because I was looking at 0xb1's address and noticed someone had sent HM tokens to them, but the address was different, so I traced it back to the scammer and just as I opened Etherscan it had a transaction pending, which was to remove liquidity.

But in the end it was just a regular fake token scam...

rekt: Stepping back, how would you characterize the whole Hashmask frenzy?

Mariano: It's an interesting experiment, I expect more and more of these to emerge. This one at least was original enough. It's all game theory and ape taxes in the end. You see people buying Hashmasks for 0.1 ETH so you do it because you don't want to be the one paying 0.3 ETH or 0.5 ETH. Although you might want to be the one to pay 100 ETH, that's bragging rights. You think, "who knows? Could be the next cryptopunks".

rekt: Looking further out, do you see buyers eventually collecting digital art mainly for its aesthetic merit, or will the speculative and investment angle keep driving most of the interest?

Mariano: Given the permissionless nature of Ethereum and the high risk/reward of being the first to own something that could be valuable, my guess is for now digital art and speculation are inextricably linked.

rekt: Last one — anything you'd like to say directly to our readers, Mariano?

Mariano: Ask yourself when you are aping into the next new thing if you're doing it because you love digital art or just want to speculate and make a quick buck. There are no right answers, whatever you choose do it with conviction and please do your research. Stay safe!

NFTs are being carried upward by the broader crypto market's momentum. Nobody yet fully grasps the ceiling on what digital scarcity might enable — this looks like the opening chapter of a genuinely new asset class.

A large share of today's NFT projects are unlikely to still exist later on, and some of the prices being paid right now will eventually look absurd in hindsight. Whichever ones do survive stand to see their value climb even further, simply on the strength of having gotten there first.

Whatever the underlying motive — dodging taxes, pure speculation, or something else entirely — the NFT market keeps climbing. Concepts written off today as gimmicks are steadily gaining legitimacy, and may eventually appeal to people who have nothing to do with crypto at all. Present-day applications will likely look primitive next to what follows. Builders and early adopters chasing a fully tokenized future are laying groundwork that could, in time, make sense even to the most conventional of investors.

Ownership is expanding past the purely physical as culture increasingly gives way to technology — and those looking to exploit that shift are innovating at exactly the same pace as those building it honestly. New scam variants targeting the Hashmasks project specifically have already begun appearing.

Whether tighter security or wider adoption wins out, and with it whether crypto crime rates fall or climb, remains an open question.