Wild West of Cryptocurrencies
Today I thought it might be a good chance to take a look at what I like to call the wild west side of cryptocurrencies.
A new DeFi project that launched on Thursday Oct 28th which had raised over $60 million during its token sale. Has found the funds seemed to have disappeared, and no one is sure exactly how. On Friday, investors woke up to the shocking news that their funds had all but disappeared. Around 13,556.36 ETH, which at current prices is worth approx. $60 million, was drained from AnubisDAO’s liquidity pool.
The project, AnubisDAO, was being promoted as a fork of OlympusDAO — a cryptocurrency backed by the assets in its treasury. It was based on Anubis, an Egyptian god of death with a dog’s head. Although Anubis identified itself as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), the details of the project were unclear. And even though it did not have an official website, investors still pumped in $60 million worth of ETH into it. The token sale started on Thursday, with investors putting ETH into the project and receiving Anubis tokens (ANKH) in return. However, the token sale, which was supposed to last for 24 hours, lasted only 20. The reason was the removal of the liquidity pool by an unknown entity. And the $60 million in ETH that had been raised in the token sale was then sent to a different address. Subsequently, the value of the ANKH token dropped to almost zero. Investors are still in shock about how quickly the whole thing happened. Brian Nguyen, who invested in the project and lost nearly $470,000, spoke to about the unfortunate event.
He admitted that he did not investigate the project thoroughly before investing.
“We, in crypto, tend to have a ‘buy first, do research later,’ mentality,” he says.
He mentioned that he was interested in AnubisDAO because it was similar to other dog-inspired cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), which have surged in popularity lately. The fact that the sale was on a popular auction platform also encouraged him to invest. Also, a crypto influencer who he respected – 0xSisyphus on Twitter – supported the project. “So, I had some conviction on the buy.”
Shortly after investors started talking about losing their money, people speculated that Copper Launch was probably compromised. In response, Copper Launch said it was not, “but the Anubis team seems to have compromised their admin keys,” The Auction platform also released a yesterday regarding the incident. There have been many guesses on what really happened. Some suspect it to be a “rug pull.” A rug pull is a common type of crypto scam where a project is created with the specific intention of stealing investor funds. Others think it could be a phishing attack, where hackers target victims to steal crypto credentials. Either way, as the investigation is ongoing anything written here is just speculation. And while I’m not writing the article to paint crypto technology in a negative light I thought it would be a great idea to show just how new and risky this unexplored financial frontier can be.
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