The ongoing hype about the abnormally high returns from Defi tokens has naturally seen many more investors moving funds to decentralized protocols. As of October 10, the total value locked in Defi protocols was nearly $11 billion. However, despite this apparent endorsement of Defi, rug pulling incidents and outright scams now seem to be blighting this space.
Reporting on the growing of Defi protocols and exposing the fact that some devs and founders wilfully engage in practices that harm the interests of the burgeoning Defi Community.
The Community disapproved of SBF’s Actions.
Just recently, Sam Bankman Fried (SBF), the individual that took over the reins at SushiSwap in early September, was accused of acting immorally.
The allegations https://rekt.ghost.io/whale-hunt-sbf-blue-kirby/ stem from SBF’s use of FTT (a centralized token) as collateral for short selling other assets. It has emerged that the Community did not approve SBF’s actions and reports suggest the matter will be resolved via a vote which ends October 14.
However, before the vote is even closed, critics are making the argument that if “economically rational market participants such as SBF can take advantage of these tools in a way that the community doesn’t approve of, the immaturity of both the market and its users are revealed.”
Meanwhile, SBF, who is defending his actions, is not the only influencer getting panned for using a privileged position to enrich himself. Blue Kirby, the YFI fanboy, is another prominent individual that has been criticized first for actively promoting Andre Cronje’s messed up EMN before it got hacked. Secondly, Kirby faces accusations of dumping his YFI when the Defi token suffered losses in the past few weeks.
12 Defi Con Artists Exposed
The complaints against SBF and Blue Kirby are just two of the many cases where influential individuals are caught acting contrary to the values they publicly espouse. However, in many cases, Defi con artists are only exposed after making off with millions of dollars in investor funds. Below lists some Defi projects or tokens, which, according to a Boxmining, have turned out to be scams.
Amplyfi.money : Rug pulled after collecting 2,500 ETH from investors. According to a message left on the website, the Amplyfi.money team claim that “one of the devs compromised wallet and was able to use a little-known vulnerability in the compiler itself.” It adds that “devs are receiving a fair amount of threats, so we decided to terminate the project.”
Beer Garden Finance : According to the newsletter, the founder holds over 50% of his wallet’s token supply. When the Community asked for more details such as a Github link for the project, or timelocks for the tokens, they were banned from the Telegram group.
Burn Vault Finance ($BFV) : The newsletter says the team behind this protocol rug pulled. We also confirmed the community Telegram account is no longer active.
CBDAO ($BREE) : According to the Newsletter, the project had a presale for $SBREE tokens, which would be swapped for $BREE. One of the admin wallets exploited a backdoor in the SBREE token contract, minted 50,000 SBREE. After that, the SBREE was converted into BREE and sold it on the market, thus pushing down BREE’s price at other holders’ expense. The 50,000 BREE was sold for under 200 [ETH].
Degenballz : The Boxmining newsletter says staking “may steal 1% of your LP tokens.” On, one user is seemingly complaining about the 1% LP staking fee paid to developers. The user, known as HuntingtheCoins expresses disappointment that this fact had not been disclosed upfront.
Emerald Mine (EMD) : According to the newsletter, user tokens worth nearly USD$2.5mil that were supposedly locked under a smart contract were moved to another account. Fortunately, cryptocurrency exchange Changenow managed to stop the sale of 135,020 [EOS]. However, this only represents a tiny portion of the total amount of funds stolen.
Lv.finance : Falsified audit results. After investors deposited their funds, they found they could not withdraw. The team has since disappeared, and the website was down at the time of writing.
Minions Farm : Minions will access all your assets when you connect your wallet to the Minions Wallet site. According to the message left Minions Farm’s page on Medium, the post(s) was under investigation for alleged violation of posting rules. The official website was also down at the time of writing.
Tomatoes.finance : The newsletter says a hacker allegedly triggered simple permission granting and withdrew tokens. Observed that since September 23, there has been no activity on their Medium page.
UniCat ($MEOW) : A back door in smart contracts allowed UniCat to keep control over users’ tokens even after being withdrawn from the pool. Around USD$200,000 worth of crypto has supposedly been stolen.
Unirocket ($URCKT) : The newsletter says creators of this token rug-pulled and now cannot be located on social media. Similarly, I could not find any information on Unirocket on social media.
Yfdex.finance : The project promoted itself on Twitter for 2 days, took a total of USD$20million of investor funds, and disappeared. On Yfdex.finance scam in September.
From the list, prospective Defi token investors can see standard methods and tactics that have been used by fraudsters to engineer theft of funds. Since there is no regulation and anonymous entities issue most of the tokens, investors have no chance of recovering lost funds once defrauded.
Rug Pulling Threatens Defi
In the medium to long term, continuing incidents of rug pulling will hurt the belief that decentralized finance can be the panacea to the longstanding problem of financial exclusion. Influencers and community leaders should help fix these problems as doing this is the only way to maintain the public’s interest in Defi. More importantly, such an effort could help stave off regulators from imposing restrictive rules that curtail the space’s further growth.
Thank you
For clearing this mess @ your level, improve PR in YFI, and restore trust.