🚨🚨Another high-profile fall from crypto grace. Vladimir Smerkis, co-founder of the much-hyped crypto game Blum on Telegram, was officially arrested on May 16th, charged with fraud and already taken into custody. His arrest sent shockwaves across the crypto community and marked yet another chapter in a career riddled with controversy and shattered investor hopes.
For over a year, users of Blum—dubbed the “Hamster Kombat clone”—had been promised real money rewards for tapping away and farming in-game tokens. Expectations peaked as the team hinted at a future token launch that never materialized. Instead, news broke that Smerkis quietly stepped down from his position, and within 24 hours, authorities made their move.
This wasn’t Smerkis’s first crypto rodeo. His resume is a graveyard of failed promises. Before founding Blum, he held a key role in Binance’s CIS operations, only to pivot toward launching his own crypto ventures post-2022. The pattern? Big promises, flashy marketing, and financial ruin for those who trusted him.
It started with The Token Fund in 2017—one of the earliest crypto investment funds. Investors bought the internal token TKN with real crypto assets, lured by promises of amplified returns. The fund raised over $8 million, profited further from the crypto bull market, then disappeared in 2018, leaving investors empty-handed.
But the show didn’t end there. His next venture, Tokenbox, attracted $7 million in fresh investments. The token TBX hit major exchanges only to collapse in value almost instantly, fading into obscurity just as quickly as it arrived.
Now, with his arrest tied to allegations of fraud amounting to at least $15 million, the question arises—how many more of these crypto sagas will unfold before the industry learns its lesson?
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