Ethereum's much-anticipated L2 platform Base, by Coinbase, witnesses its third "rug pull" attack in about two weeks. It has only launched in full-fledged mainnet this month.
SwirlLend DeFi commits rug pull, drains $800,000 from liquidity pools
Team of decentralized lending and borrowing protocol SwirlLend commited a rug pull today, as reported by PeckShield security audior. In total, over $784,300 in liquidity mysteriously disappeared from its lending pools. Both the Twitter account and the official website of the project are shut down.
#PeckShieldAlert #Rugpull SwirlLend on #Base has been rugged. The TVL of SwirlLend has dropped from $784.3K to $49.2K. @SwirlLend has already deleted its social platform.
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) August 16, 2023
The deployer has already bridged ~$289.5K worth of cryptos from #Base to #Ethereum, including 140.68 $ETH… pic.twitter.com/O0fFjA7zKR
The malefactors immediately started withdrawing funds from SwirlLend protocol. First, they transferred the funds from Ethereum's L2s to Ethereum (ETH) mainnet. Then, over $462,000 were laundered through Tornado Cash obfuscating mechanism (cryptocurrency mixer).
SwirlLend promoted itself as a high-performance "yield farming" machine with impressive APY rates for various Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies. It started growing a month ago. According to DeFiLlama tracker, last week, its TVL metric rocketed.
Since Aug.12, its TVL almost tripled.
As covered by U.Today previously, Base blockchain, since its launch, has been in focus for malefactors organizing rug pull attacks. On July 31, 2023, BALD meme coin lost all of its liquidity after a 40,000% rally.
In no time, it lost over $85 million in market capitalization.
First rug pull on Linea?
Also, meme token FrensTech launched by a Uniswap officer was rug pulled last Saturday, Aug. 12, 2023. Fortunately, the scammer only managed to drain 14 WETH from liquidity pools.
The same day, the mastermind of this attack was fired by Uniswap founder Hayden Adams.
However, SwirlLend rug pull is a unique one. As the dApp was running on both Base and Consensys's L2 Linea, for the second network, it is the first exit scam ever.
The attackers already bridged 94 Ethers from Linea to Ethereum (ETH) via Orbiter Finance decentralized bridge ecosystem.
Mushumir Butt
Yuri Molchan
Tomiwabold Olajide
