A brand new DeFi protocol Meerkat Finance, based on Binance Smart Chain has been rug pulled for $30 Million within 24 Hours of launch.This alleged scam could be the largest exit scam on BSC.
Meerkat Finance Team announced on its Telegram channel about the loss of funds and attack on its infrastructure. The project vaults have been drained of 13.96 Million BUSD and 73000 BNB.
To fuel the worry further, the Official project website is shut down, Founders have gone unreachable, social media channels are closed, and Github repositories have been removed.
A Chinese journalist took to Twitter to inform the community of the mishap.
Binance’s response.
The spokesperson of Binance gave a statement to CoinDesk saying
“ The joint security team is monitoring the Meerkat Finance situation”.
“ If the money flows into the exchange, it will be frozen as soon as possible. BSC is an open-source ecosystem and Binance is not directly connected to projects built on it”
Further updates will be given to the community when they can, they said.
In the aftermath of the incident, the scammed investors have started a Telegram Channel to make a collaborative effort towards getting their money back.
Some traders have even tried to reach out to the CEO Chenpeng Zhao.
The suspicions.
The allegations imply that the Meerkat developer’s account has been used to alter the smart contract, and made changes to the project’s vault business logic. It is being said, Either the private key was infiltrated or the developers themselves have done it.
Although scams in the Defi ecosystem have increased year by year, many protocols with the same use-cases, have gotten away with investor money after creating a false hype.
Binance Smart Chain has witnessed a great run and increased trading volumes this year, due to Ethereum’s congestion and high gas fee, it shot up from $50 to $342.88 last month. This event could prove to be a setback to its growth
Binance Coin, at the time of writing, is trading at $220.32 with a 10.10% dip in growth.
