While we usually wouldn’t respond to rumors, we understand tensions in the community are already high, and wanted to address them quickly. The ZAP team does not have a history of rugpull.

In December last year, I had plans to build a launchpad on Blast. I wanted to build a permissionless token launcher and a high quality launchpad for the best deals on Blast, but I had less than 90 days to build a product for the Big Bang Competition.

I’ve never built this type of app before so I asked friends of mine if they had suggestions. I was later introduced to Carlo and Ralph, who had previously built Lithium Ventures, a launchpad on Polygon.

Lithium & The ZAP Labs launchpad

Lithium was in no way a rug pull, or a scam. These accusations are unequivocally false. The project had some success, but eventually closed down due to the super competitive landscape for Polygon launchpads. The Lithium team has built other software before, and also had great success in Web2.

Building software isn’t easy and it takes time. As you are all aware, ZAP is less than 1 year old, yet we have launched 3 products and gained 500,000+ users from all over the world. This would not have been possible without using some existing code from the team's past, in this case, Labs (the launchpad - which hasn’t even done any sales) and Drops (the mission and questing platform).

When I engaged with Lithium, I was aware that they had launched a token before and it hadn’t worked out. That didn’t mean they were scammers, it’s incredibly hard to make a token successful long term. That didn’t stop me from wanting to build with them.

Our team all have a history in software, and yes, we have built things before, it’s not all worked out, but that experience has allowed us to scale tremendously quickly.

Flexx.gg is a ZAP Labs incubation. Just to make it clear what we mean by incubation, the ZAP team gives resources and tech support to the Flexx team to help them build product market fit and survive the early stages of the startup. This incubation strategy is also backed by some of our investors.

Flexx is also using ZAP software (our missions API) and largely will be supported both professionally and technically in its early stages. Much of the Flexx.gg tech has already been built out, and will be usable by the public in the near future.

All we have offered for Flexx, is a very large airdrop to ZAP stakers and holders. There has been no fundraising round or request to the community in any form.

We previously advertised two projects that would be on the Labs launchpad. Seismic and DegenWars.

For transparency, neither of these projects were incubated by us, we were working closely but from a much later point in their lifecycle. Sadly, Seismic actually closed down this year due to lack of traction on Blast. We were not confident we could provide a return to investors with DegenWars, so we also did not go ahead with this raise, this was largely because it wasn’t an incubation, and they had already raised at a fairly high valuation.

As we addressed in the community just yesterday, we will not be working on the launchpad, or the questing products for the time being - as they are trust based products. We understand trust is at a low, and we do not expect people to invest time or money into these products until we regain trust.

To date, we have not raised any money on the launchpad. This decision was made to protect our users, because we were not confident we could provide a return on Blast.

Flexx is different from Seismic or DegenWars, because our team can closely support them from day 1. We built the brand, the website, and the Flexx team will use the ZAP API to offer missions on their link in bio tool.

There are also statements claiming that we sold ZAP tokens, which is absolutely untrue. To date, we have bought back over 5 million tokens. We understand people are frustrated about the price of ZAP, but these baseless rumors do not help, they actually cause further harm.

As we have stated before, we are committed to continue to build the project, and we have a 5 year plan.