Comparing a Scam Token to Cardano? The Ridiculous Story of Retik Finance

ADA Crunch
4 min readJan 15, 2024

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A lot of recent articles have been talking about a new cryptocurrency called “Retik Finance.” Make no mistake, Retik Finance is obviously a scam. Do not interact with their website and do not send them any of your crypto. Normally, I would just ignore these obvious scam, but what surprised me today was that my google news feed suggested an article with this ridiculous headline:

A quick look at their website (which I will not link here to prevent any potential reader from being scammed themselves) and it is obvious that Retik Finance is a scam.

The scam token is being featured in a lot of articles on small-time Indian news outlets. The articles are vague, misleading, and oftentimes just outright wrong. Take this little snippet from one of these articles:

The article claims that a 2.65% price dip invalidates Cardano as a leader in “evolving crypto landscape.” This is absolutely preposterous. A 2.65% price dip is completely insignificant and a token’s price is not indicative of a cryptocurrency’s underlying technology. A token’s price only represents the demand from buyers for a token in a marketplace.

Taking a look at their website is also hilariously ridiculous. The first thing you are greeted with is a presale that asks you to connect your wallet. Again, please do not connect your wallet to this:

They also display the address for their token. Which, oddly enough, is an ERC20 token. So their claims of low-fee transactions are blatantly false, anything transaction on the Ethereum blockchain carries a hefty fee (I took the liberty to check the etherscan page and found that a transfer of Retik tokens cost around $5–6 in Ethereum per transaction, which is obviously not cheap).

The token’s etherscan page is even more hilarious. There are only 8 holders of all Retik tokens and all 8 of those holders are likely the same person. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Those percentages show how much of the total supply of Retik tokens are owned by each wallet. See how those numbers are all nice, pretty numbers that end in zeros? Yeah, it’s definitely unnatural and are all likely the same person (not to mention the top wallet owns 40% of the total supply).

Scrolling down further on their website reveals some more nonsense.

They claim to be audited, have a KYC process, and a whitepaper. KYC for a cryptocurrency? That sounds really counter-intuitive.

The audit button leads to this audit report, which already claims Retik is a “high risk” and that the creator of Retik can blacklist any account and has the ability to enable/disable trades. This is another a red flag to add to the list.

The KYC button just goes to a page that says KYC is pending:

The whitepaper is extremely vague, uses a lot of buzzwords, and doesn’t discuss any type of technology at all. It’s an embarrassing collage of buzzwords attempting to look authentic.

Going back to the original article, if you scroll to the bottom, you’ll find this little disclaimer:

Neither the author nor the website (ThePrint, an Indian news outlet) will take responsibility for the the content of this outrageous article. Typical.

Retik Finance is a laughably dumb scam. The fact that people still fall for these kinds of scams is something I still don’t understand. But google suggesting these kinds of articles in my feed? That’s even more outrageous. Google must have some kind of basic process to filter out these kinds of scummy articles. Because of Google’s complacency, so many more people will be exposed to these scams.

In short, Retik Finance is nothing compared to Cardano. Retik Finance will never replace Cardano. Retik Finance is a scam. Don’t fall for scams. Google needs to get better at not suggesting scam articles in news feeds to users.

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ADA Crunch

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ADA Crunch

No opinions, no shills. Just a Cardano aficionado with things to share. Find me on twitter @ADA_Crunch, Publish0x, hashnode, and r/CryptoGasFees.