It was around 9 AM in Toronto, Canada, when Arya Khalaj, a designer and crypto trader who goes by ctrl on X, thought he had stumbled onto something brilliant.

The project was called Emerald and it claimed to combine ERC-20 tokens with NFTs in a way that could solve NFT liquidity issues for good. It appeared to be the solution for a lot of issues Khalaj had come across while working with different crypto projects. 

He went all in. While chatting online with a friend known pseudonymously as Searn, they started throwing in clips of ether. During this time, the chart just kept going up. Once they ran out of ether, they dipped into their investments in other projects and were soon in to the tune of around $60,000 each. 

Then, without warning, the project was exploited and the …