Written by Cenk Hasan Ozdemir
In the fast-paced world of Web3 and artificial intelligence, projects can rise and fall with dizzying speed. Few, however, have imploded as spectacularly and as silently as Network3. After raising $5.5 million from a consortium of prominent venture capital firms in mid-2024 , the ambitious AI project has all but vanished, its token worthless, its social media a ghost town, and its founder, Rock Zhang, nowhere to be found. This is the story of a project that promised to democratize AI but instead delivered a masterclass in how to execute a modern-day crypto exit scam, leaving a trail of broken promises and depleted wallets.
The Hype and the Capital
Network3 burst onto the scene with a compelling vision: to build a decentralized AI Layer2 network. The project claimed it would leverage the power of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) to create a global, community-owned platform for AI development, breaking the monopoly of tech giants. The pitch was convincing enough to attract $5.5 million in pre-seed and seed funding from investors including Borderless Capital, EV3, IoTeX Eco Fund, and SNZ Holding .
Founder Rock Zhang, a Stanford GSB alumnus with a background in internet security, became the face of the project. In interviews, he touted impressive, albeit difficult to verify, metrics. “We currently have 240,000 live nodes worldwide and will release a physical mining machine in the coming months,” Zhang told The Block in July 2024 . The project’s website, which remains eerily active, still boasts of over 630,000 nodes and a staggering claim of $3 million+ in monthly revenue .
The Token That Went to Zero
The project’s native token, $N3, was launched with great fanfare on January 22, 2025, listing on major exchanges like Bybit, Gate.io, and BingX . On its first day, the token reached an all-time high of approximately $0.20 .
This peak, however, was tragically brief. The token’s value immediately began a precipitous decline from which it would never recover. The collapse was not a gradual slide but a catastrophic freefall, a pattern often associated with
so-called “rug pulls,” where developers dump their own tokens onto the market, crashing the price and absconding with the funds. By July 2025, just six months after its launch, the token’s value had fallen by 100% for the month . Today, it is effectively worthless, and the project has been marked as “delisted” by scam-tracking websites .
The Disappearance of a Founder and a Project
As the $N3 token spiraled towards zero, the project’s public-facing activity abruptly ceased. The official Network3 Twitter account (@network3_ai), which boasts over 335,000 followers, has been silent since approximately April 2025. Its last significant post was a thread about the “chip war” and the need for decentralized computing . Before that, the account was a flurry of activity, promoting staking with promises of 200% APY, announcing a $10 million mining fund in February 2025, and celebrating partnerships .
More alarmingly, founder Rock Zhang has also vanished from the public eye. His last known post on LinkedIn, where he was once an active promoter of the project, was on February 3, 2025, announcing the very same mining fund that appears to have never materialized . Since then, there has been no communication, no updates, and no explanations for the project’s utter collapse.
A Trail of Red Flags
In retrospect, the warning signs were numerous. The project’s tokenomics, which allocated a significant 22.5% of the total supply to the team and shareholders , provided a strong incentive for insiders to cash out. The aggressive marketing, promises of impossibly high staking rewards, and the immediate, catastrophic price crash post-launch all fit the classic pattern of a pump-and-dump scheme.
The project’s website, frozen in time, now serves as a digital monument to the deception. It continues to display inflated statistics of active nodes and revenue, a stark contrast to the reality of a dead project and a worthless token. The events page lists no activities past November 2024, a clear sign that development and community engagement halted long ago.
For the thousands of retail investors who bought into the hype, the physical miners who invested in hardware, and the community members who held on to the promise of a decentralized AI future, the silence from Rock Zhang and the Network3 team is deafening. The $5.5 million raised from venture capitalists may have been the seed money, but it was the funds of ordinary people that fueled the project’s brief, spectacular flameout. As the crypto world continues to grapple with the persistent threat of scams, the story of Network3 serves as a harsh and costly reminder: in the decentralized world, as in the old one, there are still those who will build castles in the air, only to disappear when the bill comes due.
The AI Oracle reached out to Network3 for comments but did not receive a response by press time.