- Written by: Nick
- Sun, 28 Nov 2021
- Russian Federation
Snowdog Rug Pull: The “first” memecoin, and supposed “Shib Killer,” rug pulled its holders. Hardly anyone is surprised. Find out why. Covered: Snowdog Rug Pull SDOG Buzz Snowdog Mortem: No One’s Buying It Snowdog Rug Pull This weekend, the largest rug pull in the history of Avalanche has rocked the network and it’s users. SDOG, […] The post Snowdog Rug Pull Rocks Avalanche: What Happened appeared first on CryptosRus.
Snowdog Rug Pull Rocks Avalanche: What Happened
Snowdog Rug Pull: The “first” memecoin, and supposed “Shib Killer,” rug pulled its holders. Hardly anyone is surprised. Find out why.
Covered:
- Snowdog Rug Pull
- SDOG Buzz
- Snowdog Mortem: No One’s Buying It
Snowdog Rug Pull
This weekend, the largest rug pull in the history of Avalanche has rocked the network and it’s users. SDOG, the first meme coin launched on Avalanche was rugged for $10 million, with the team admitting they had “f**ked up.” Yet on the other hand, they are calling it a “game theory experiment” gone wrong.
Letter from the Snowbank team. We'll keep building, we'll keep pushing. pic.twitter.com/qWIiQ5ikqa
— Snowbank (@SnowbankDAO) November 27, 2021
Snowdog DAO was the protocol behind the SDOG token which, at press time, lost over 90% of its value. It was a complex scheme which involved insiders exploiting a “challengekey” in the smart contract which only they had access to.
@SnowdogDAO $SDOG rugpulled. Here's how:
1. Promised a 40M buyback happening on its own DEX Snowswap and migrated all liquidity from Joe
2. Snowswap contract requires a "challengeKey" to trade which only insiders knew it beforehand
3. Insiders backran the buyback and made 10M pic.twitter.com/tfKDqA4t4I— TechnoArtoria (,) (@artoriamaster) November 25, 2021
The coin and the project were only eight days old before the rug pull occurred. It was actually launched as an eight-day “experiment” that was supposed to end with a massive buyback of SDOG tokens. However, an insider who knew the challengekey, which was part of the SnowdogDAO contract, backran the buyback. Because the insider had what was essentially a password, they were able to dump the coin at their earliest convenience.
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SDOG Buzz
The prospect of the buyback generated buzz in the Avalanche community, and remarkably, the coin reached a price of $6,819 on November 18th. The buyback was supposed to be financed by the Snowdog treasury generated through mint sales.
In those eight days, the treasury grew to $44 million dollars. Holders of SDOG thought that they would have a chance to earn some of those millions when the buyback was supposed to occur.
What the protocol failed to disclose to buyers of SDOG was that only 7% of the SDOG supply was “eligible to be sold” above market price before the buyback. Snowdog devs ironically tweeted out before the buyback that they were afraid that they could lose money due to a bot exploit.
To mitigate this, they copy/pasted code from Uniswap and built an AMM where this challengekey was added to the contract to prevent the theft.
We built our own AMM, based on Uniswap v2. We tweaked it lightly to make life harder for bots. By adding a simple mathematical challenge to the AMM, it became nearly impossible for bots to quickly adapt and understand how the swap works. Only users using the front-end could swap.
— Snowdog (@SnowdogDAO) November 25, 2021
However, when the AMM launched and the entire SDOG liquidity was migrated from the Trader Joe DEX, the insider with the challengekey liquidated most of the treasury which was supposed to be used for the buyback.
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Snowdog Post-Mortem: No One’s Buying It
Snowdog released a post-mortem which claimed there was no funny business. All indications point to this being false. They even had the audacity to say — despite the fact that everything is viewable on-chain — that the challengekey concept worked. They claimed that bot behavior resulted in failed transactions because of the key. But the opposite is true.
When users went to trade their SDOG on the new AMM it required this key to execute the contract, which of course, no one had but the insiders.
The team claims they are still moving forward with the token which has lost most of its value, including governance. However, it is clear that no one is buying the story that this wasn’t a planned soft-rug. It’s clear that many speculated a rug was afoot, but we’re waiting for the buyback, hoping for a juicy return.
I see $sdog having 2 results:
1) Team executes plan that could be the most gigabrain internal feedback loop using meme coin as a front
2) They execute a single buy, there's no feedback loop, everyone sells, and the fallout kills $SB and $sdog
No middle ground here IMO
— Mike ? (,) (@_zmike) November 24, 2021
The buyback and burn concept sounded good, and many thought this would be their golden ticket. But when it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. As one anonymous Twitter user said, “Oh well. Onto the next ponzi.”
Oh, wow! $SB and $SDOG removed from @traderjoe_xyz pic.twitter.com/hDHeYTIUkB
— CryptoPaule (@crypto_paule) November 27, 2021
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