Franklin disclosed on Twitter that "Due to an unfortunate IRL issue, I have had to sell off a lot of BAYC apes to pay off BendDAO loans while the liquidity was available". He had recently sold 27 of the Bored Apes. He later wrote, "I got rug pulled on an investment I put almost 2000 ETH into, thinking it was credible due to who else invested (not naming anyone for privacy reasons). Someone used our $$ as a casino gambling Ponzi and flushed it down the drain. Please learn any lessons possible from this." 2,000 ETH is worth around $4.23 million at today's ETH prices.
People immediately began to speculate about what project he could be referring to. Some wondered if perhaps he was trying to cover up losses on the Rollbit crypto casino, which he was known to use, and where he could be observed on-chain depositing more than 6,000 ETH (~$12.7 million) since the beginning of the year alone. Later in the day, he wrote another tweet: "For partial transparency: My personal PnL [profit and loss] of my Rollbit gambles is about -650 ETH total. So yes I lost a lot of money myself on Rollbit, but that didn’t require me to sell off today." At today's prices, 650 ETH is around $1.375 million.
Franklinisbored expressed that he would be taking a break from NFT trading and social media following the incident: "I won't get involved in NFT trading/twitter for a while, and will just focus on my private life for the time being with my remaining apes."