A new crypto project claims to have taken its own developer hostage and is threatening to kill him unless the currency’s market cap reaches $1 million.
Solana token ‘Hostage Dev’ is being promoted on X (formerly Twitter) using a live stream purporting to show a hostage that the team has kidnapped.
The ‘hostage’ can be seen bound and bagged in a nondescript room holding a cardboard placard that reads, “Please, let’s go to 1milly mcap or else I’m dead.” Other tweets from the Hostage Dev X account read “Guess who’s not going to sleep today? #HOSTAGE,” and “Dev completely knocked out on the stream? We don’t care.”
“Please, let’s go to 1milly mcap or else I’m dead.”
The look of the Hostage Dev website is based on so-called ‘Wojack’ memes and traditional ‘cut-out’ ransom notes, and reads “We have your developer! If you want us to free him you need to pump chart to 1,000,000 marketcap.”
The Hostage Dev token currently has a 24-hour volume of $213K and a market cap of $7.58K. This means it’s $992,420 away from the kidnappers’ target of $1 million.
The site features a bagged man in a puddle of urine, a man wearing a balaclava, computers with Solana imagery, and a rising price chart.
The team isn’t exactly sure of the legality of the stunt, as it confessed on X, “Hope I don’t get swatted for this hahaha.” This was immediately followed by “Dev still hanging in, begging 😂😂😂.”
In the United States, hostage-taking is the “seizing or detention of an individual coupled with a threat to kill, injure or continue to detain… to compel a third person or governmental organization to take some action.” Possible sentences include life imprisonment, and if the hostage is killed, the death penalty.