The VC firm had received a grant from the project in return for locking $40 million worth of liquidity in SYN.
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The price of the native token of decentralized finance (DeFi) cross-chain bridge Synapse (SNY) plummeted on Sept. 5 after an unknown liquidity provider on the platform dumped nearly 9 million SYN tokens and pulled all stablecoin liquidity from the bridge.
The official X account for Synapse acknowledged the liquidity rug by an “unknown liquidity provider,” while clarifying that the Synapse bridge didn’t face any security breach.
A Synapse liquidity provider sold their SYN tokens and removed liquidity today. We’re investigating unusual activity on their wallets and are working to get in touch with them. Will update once there is more info.
There was no security breach of the protocol or bridge.
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— Synapse Labs (@SynapseProtocol) September 5, 2023
The unknown liquidity provider in question was traced to Nima Capital, one of the long-term capital partners of the project. The venture capital firm had received a grant from the project in return for locking $40 million worth of liquidity in SYN. Etherscan data suggest the unknown whale that dumped the SYN token received 10 million SYN($3.4M) from “Synapse: Executor 2” wallet on April 5 and currently holds no SYN tokens in the wallet.
The VC firm rug pulled its users just eight months before the agreed governance proposal. This became evident after the Nima Capital website went offline and the project also locked their X (formerly Twitter), going dark online, prompting many to call it a VC rug.
Even VCs are rugging now @NimaCapital dumped 9M $SYN and removed all stablecoin liquidity 8 months before the agreed gov proposal
Their site went offline and twitter protected too https://t.co/ShlYcZhFbz pic.twitter.com/1ncxP13XYV
— Wazz (@WazzCrypto) September 4, 2023
Rug pulls are quite a common form of scam in the DeFi ecosystems where the project creators or developers often change code or pull the plug on the project after the native token of the project reaches a certain price threshold. However, a rug pull by a VC firm is uncommon.
Related: Newly discovered Bitcoin wallet loophole let hackers steal $900K — SlowMist
The price of the native token SYN fell more than 20% as a result of the token dump, registering a multi-week low of $0.30 before recovering to above $0.35 later in the day.
While DeFi bridges made interoperability easier among different protocols, these bridges are often the primary target of exploiters with some of the biggest DeFi hacks taking place on these cross-chain bridge protocols.
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