Magnate Finance Orchestrates Rug Pull, Over $6 Million Stolen

Magnate Finance, a lending and borrowing protocol that operates on the Ethereum Layer-2 network Base, has apparently orchestrated a rug pull, stealing millions from users of the protocol.

The rug pull had been predicted by on-chain sleuths, including ZachXBT, who cited several previous actions of the project’s founders.

Details Of The Rug Pull

Magnate Finance has also effectively cleared its entire digital presence, having deleted its Telegram group on the 25th of August. It also took its website offline, rendering it inaccessible on the same day. The protocol later deleted its X (formerly Twitter) account as well, effectively erasing its entire digital and social media presence. Mere hours after deleting its entire social media presence, Magnate Finance developers manipulated the price oracle of the protocol. This let them remove all assets within the protocol, removing around $6.4 million of the total value locked (TVL) in the protocol, effectively collapsing the project.

Security firm PeckShield called this occurrence a classic rug pull and also conducted an investigation into the situation. The security firm stated that the developers behind the project transferred around $1.34 million worth of DAI tokens to a new address. Later, they bridged around $1 million of the stolen funds to the BNB Smart Chain. The firm also tracked five different wallets, all of which were linked to the Magnate Finance scammers. PeckShield added that the scammers had manually manipulated the price oracle, allowing them to drain funds.

A majority of the stolen funds went to several Ethereum Layer-2 platforms, such as Optimism and Arbitrum, along with the BNB Smart Chain using Stargate. Around 295 ETH and 1.3 million DAI tokens are currently held on the Base chain.

ZachXBT Had Warned Of Potential Exit Scam

The Magnate Finance rug pull came to light after a warning issued by on-chain investigator ZachXBT. ZachXBT had issued a warning that the developers behind the Magnate Finance protocol could orchestrate an exit scam. The on-chain investigator reached this conclusion after discovering that the Magnate Finance deployer address was linked to a previous exit scam involving a project called Solfire. Solfire defrauded its users of around $4.8 million.