🤑 We All Get a Rug Pull!

The word of the week is "rugpull", as SundaeSwap and CardStarter have a spat over allegedly stealing 150m tokens, and TIME rug pulling Terra LUNA.

Hacker: OpenSea is Adding Solana NFTs and Phantom Wallet Support
Degen Ape #8465, asking price 3950 SOL on Solanart

Hacker: OpenSea is Adding Solana NFTs and Phantom Wallet Support

Hacked screenshots from Jane Manchun Wong suggest OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, is adding support for Solana NFTs and the Phantom wallet. Jane Manchun Wong, a hacker famous for leaking unreleased software features, found the Solana integrations while reverse-engineering the OpenSea website.

OpenSea Phantom Solana NFT integration
Source: @wongmjane
OpenSea Phantom Solana crypto wallet integration
Source: @wongmjane

One screenshot shows Solana listed among three currently supported blockchains: Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn. The other shows the Phantom wallet listed among currently supported crypto wallets.

OpenSea said this Solana integration was "old speculation" and that the company prefers to announce its new features and integrations using official channels.

Jane Manchun Wong mentioned to Decrypt that "there were other references outside of mentions within the user interface" to the unreleased Solana NFT and Phantom wallet integrations. She also said that OpenSea put effort into hiding these details.

OpenSea rumored to add Solana NFT integration
Source: @bhaleyart

This isn't the first time someone leaked an OpenSea screenshot showing a Solana integration on Twitter. In November, 2021, Twitter user B.Haley leaked a screenshot similar to Wong's, showing Solana listed among currently supported blockchains.

Leaked product features and integrations are becoming a pattern in crypto. In September 2021, Twitter’s Bitcoin integration was leaked by Alessandro Paluzzi using, of course, Twitter. That particular leak was later confirmed when Twitter rolled out Bitcoin tipping.


CardStarter Accuses SundaeSwap of Stealing 150M
Photo by Pawel Janiak / Unsplash

CardStarter Accuses SundaeSwap of Stealing 150M

There was turmoil this week in the Cardano ecosystem when CardStarter (CARDS), a decentralized accelerator and swapping platform, made claims that SundaeSwap stole millions from their investors. SundaeSwap is a recently launched decentralized exchange (DEX), the first of its kind in the Cardano (ADA) ecosystem. SundaeSwap was already having its fair share of problems after last week's launch, wherein users saw days-long wait times for their transactions.

The History

In July 2021, it was announced that SundaeSwap and CardStarter were teaming up to solve the liquidity problems that SundaeSwap was anticipating at the time of their launch. Part of this deal involved an agreement that CardStarter was going to cease development on their DEX. In a Twitter Q&A, a CardStarter senior operations advisor said this was a merger between the two companies.

In October, according to the CardStarter CEO, a deal was reached for 150M SUNDAE tokens (7.5% of the total supply) to be given to the CardStarter community for providing liquidity. The text communications between the two companies wherein this was agreed upon were publicly released.

The Drama

This past week, according to private messages released by the CardStarter team, SundaeSwap’s co-founder said the amount of SUNDAE being allocated to the partnership was being cut to 10M. From these messages, SundaeSwap says the reduction is due to the CardStarter team being massively short in terms of the promised Total Value Locked (TVL) they brought to the table. The initial promise was $200M in liquidity, and the real number at launch of the SundaeSwap DEX was roughly $10M.

Many investors are calling this a rug pull. Charles Hoskinson, the founder and figurehead behind Cardano, took to Youtube to request the teams stop disputing in public, and go through standard business operations of litigation and negotiations. He warned investors to consider the maturity of the people making these projects when they invest, after noting that the two teams didn’t make any contracts. Ultimately, his view on the situation was for the teams to “be f**king professionals” and to “get their s**t together!”

Responding to the public dispute, SundaeSwap released a blog post offering to increase their offer to 20M SUNDAE tokens.


How the TIME Wonderland Rug Pull Crashed Terra LUNA
Source: Wonderland

How the TIME Wonderland Rug Pull Crashed Terra LUNA

An alleged rug pull affecting Wonderland (TIME) is crashing the Terra ecosystem's LUNA token. Over the last three months, TIME has fallen to $365 from $10,000. Last week, TIME had two days where it lost more than 30% of its remaining value. LUNA has dropped to $48 from $70 over the last week.

Wonderland (TIME) to USD over last 90 days. High around $10k, current price around $365.
Wonderland (TIME) to USD over last 90 days. High around $10k, current price around $365. Source: CoinMarketCap

Michael Patryn is best known for running a Canadian crypto exchange that disappeared with over $100M of investors' money in 2019. Last week, he was revealed to be the pseudo anonymous CFO of Wonderland and to be closely associated with the Abracadabra lending platform and the Magic Internet Money (MIM) stablecoin.

Patryn is accused of removing money from the Wonderland project for a couple months, causing some investors to deem this a rug pull. This caused a steady downward trend in TIME’s value. Last week’s news of Patryn’s involvement in Wonderland accelerated the project’s decline.

The TIME token was supposed to go down in value slowly as Wonderland minted TIME to distribute to investors. As investors lost confidence in Patryn's projects, they quickly unwound their leveraged positions in TIME and MIM. This, in turn, had a negative effect on the Terra ecosystem, because Abracadabra frequently offered yield farming pairs that included Terra's US Dollar-pegged token, UST.

Chart showing Terra's UST token vs USD during Wonderland (TIME) crash
Terra's UST token vs USD during Wonderland (TIME) crash. Source: CoinMarketCap

Terra is an algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem that mints stablecoins pegged to fiats, such as the UST token, pegged to the US Dollar. Terra uses the LUNA token for transaction fees within the network. As Terra mints more UST, it burns LUNA, which raises the price of LUNA and helps keep UST stable at $1.

As Reddit user M00OSE explains, "Abracadabra used UST to an unsustainable degree via the degenbox strategy, which allowed you to loop UST deposit to 10x leverage at most. This increased the amount of UST in the ecosystem and burned LUNA, propping up the price."

Investors were using "fake" MIM that was minted with leverage to create Terra's UST token, which subsequently burned LUNA, and which then increased the price of the LUNA token. As investors unwound their MIM positions to get out of TIME and Abracadabra, UST began to lose its peg to the US Dollar. When this discrepancy arises, Terra prints LUNA tokens in an effort to stabilize UST back at $1, but the LUNA token's price decreases as a result.

TL;DR: Investors took out leverage positions on Abracadabra to print MIM, and used that artificial MIM to purchase UST. Doing this increases the price of LUNA since creating UST burns LUNA. As the positions are closed, the artificial MIM disappears and more LUNA is created to keep the price of the UST stablecoin at $1.