Astra Nova (RVV) experienced a massive sell-off just hours after its launch on Binance Alpha on October 18. On-chain monitoring showed that around dozens of addresses dumped nearly $10 million worth of RVV, causing the price to plummet from about $0.03 to a low of $0.007, a drop of up to 75%. The project team claimed this was a "theft sale" caused by the hacking of a third-party market maker's account and has initiated a public buyback with a 10% bounty, but the community still questions the possibility of insider trading or internal dumping.
This article will further outline the origins of the Astra Nova project, its token issuance and airdrop mechanisms, the on-chain sell-off paths and fund flows, and analyze the project team's response measures following the incident.
Astra Nova initially entered the public eye with the concept of an "AI-driven Web3 gaming ecosystem," with the project team claiming to create a "new world built and owned by players." According to the official website and whitepaper, Astra Nova's core setting revolves around a fictional "destroyed planet," where players explore, complete tasks, and compete for resources to drive ecological reconstruction, earning tokens and NFT rewards in the process. This narrative places Astra Nova in the composite track of "GameFi + AI + Metaverse."
In terms of technical architecture, Astra Nova is compatible with blockchain platforms such as Binance Chain, Immutable zkEVM, and Hedera, attempting to establish a cross-chain asset and identity system. In terms of financing, Astra Nova has completed Pre-Seed, Seed, and Private rounds of financing since 2024, raising a total of approximately $51 million.
The total supply of Astra Nova's native token RVV is 10 billion, serving multiple functions such as in-game transactions, NFT markets, and task rewards. The official token distribution shows that early private placements, strategic rounds, and team shares account for a significant proportion, while a considerable portion is reserved for community rewards, ecological construction, and market activities. This structure is relatively common in GameFi projects but also poses potential risks: although early holders have a cliff and linear unlocking mechanism, the ratio and timing arrangements may still create concentrated selling pressure in the early stages of the token's launch.
The airdrop and presale arrangements are also noteworthy. The project distributed hundreds of millions of RVV to active users and early supporters through various airdrop methods such as the "Deviants Mint Pass" and "Booster Program," with some rewards being tradable at TGE, while the remaining portion is set to unlock over several months. Although the official emphasized maintaining market stability through locking and gradual release, a large number of tokens that can be redeemed in the early stages of the launch still provide short-term liquidity to the market, easily triggering significant price fluctuations.
Additionally, on the eve of Astra Nova's launch, the project team suddenly changed the airdrop rules, causing strong dissatisfaction within the community. Originally promising to distribute 3% of the token rewards through a points system, just one hour before the launch, the project team announced that only the top 1.5 million users on the leaderboard would receive rewards, resulting in many originally high-ranking users being excluded from the list. The community questioned the possibility of leaderboard manipulation, and some NFT and special edition rewards were not fulfilled. As the controversy escalated, the project's official communication channels were nearly cut off, revealing an emerging trust crisis.
On October 18, the RVV token was launched on mainstream exchanges like Binance Alpha, with the initial price soaring to $0.033, and the market cap briefly exceeding $335 million. However, just hours later, the RVV price plummeted to $0.007, with a maximum drop of nearly 75%, triggering widespread skepticism.
The project team stated that this was due to a third-party market maker's account being hacked, with malicious actors dumping approximately 860 million RVV tokens (about 8.6% of the total supply) through 18 wallets, cashing out about $10.2 million. However, the project's smart contracts and infrastructure were unaffected, and they are cooperating with a blockchain forensics team to trace the stolen funds, planning to contact law enforcement once evidence collection is complete. Additionally, the project team announced a buyback plan for 89 million RVV tokens and will provide a 10% reward to the forensics team assisting in recovering the funds.
However, the community's response was mixed. Some users questioned whether there was malicious selling by internal personnel, and some analyses pointed out that the project team might have transferred 80% of the locked tokens to a multi-signature address before the launch, suggesting preemptive cashing out.
On-chain analyst Yu Jin even posted on the X platform, bluntly stating that the behavior of the so-called hacker directly exchanging a large number of tokens for USDT and holding them is very unreasonable.
Crypto KOL @AB Kuai.Dong also pointed out that the Astra Nova project has almost pushed all major participants in the industry to the opposite side—exchanges, secondary market investors, institutions, and KOLs have all been affected. The project not only publicly conducted sell-offs on-chain, prompting Binance to issue an urgent risk warning, but also unilaterally forced changes to all investors' token unlocking rules under the pretext of "cooperating with exchange requirements."
The plummeting event of Astra Nova (RVV) has far exceeded ordinary price fluctuations, evolving into a "perfect storm" that breaches industry trust. The project team's hasty modification of airdrop rules before the launch, leading to a community trust crisis, and the "mysterious" sell-off that caused the price collapse just hours after the launch, make their explanation of "third-party market maker being hacked" appear highly questionable under the scrutiny of on-chain data and community analysis.
The severity of this incident lies in its demonstration of systemic dishonesty. The project team not only failed to act as the core maintaining ecological stability but also shifted all risks and losses to the community through a series of operations—including forcibly altering unlocking rules under the guise of "cooperating with exchanges." This directly led to a complete collapse of the trust chain: the authority of exchanges was exploited, investors' rights were trampled, institutional endorsements became laughable, ultimately reducing the entire project's governance mechanism and contractual spirit to mere empty talk.
In the face of glamorous narratives and technical stacks in Web3 projects, investors need to return to the essence: examine whether the token economic model is fair and transparent, and whether the team's behavior is open and trustworthy. When the grand vision of "AI + GameFi" sharply contrasts with a series of short-term actions that harm community interests, no matter how appealing the story is, its foundation has already crumbled.
After all, trust is the most scarce asset in the crypto world.
Related: Solana founder reveals new perpetual contract DEX "Percolator" design plan
Original article: “Token Plunges 75% Hours After Launch as Astra Nova's Hacking Claim Sparks Controversy”
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
