Bondly Token Crashes 90% in Potential DeFi Rug Pull

Bondly Finance, a decentralised NFT platform, has suffered an alleged exploit from an unknown attacker.

The project claims that an “unknown party” minted 373 million $BONDLY tokens and sold them in the trading pools, causing a price drop of 90 percent in the following hours.

While the Bondly Finance team claims they were hacked and highlighted it on Twitter and Telegram, some in the crypto community are not fully convinced.

PeckShield, a blockchain security and data analytics company, said that only the owner could perform the minting, which suggests that developers were behind the attack.

According to Xuxian Jiang, founder of PeckShield, the owner pulled the trigger in transferring out 373 million tokens to sell through various exchanges. The attacker’s address used several decentralised exchanges to move the funds, which were worth about US$7.5 million at press time. 

Yet Another Exit Scam

Scams, exploitations and rug pulls (properly called exit scams) are becoming increasingly common in the DeFi space.

As Crypto News Australia reported in March, TurtleDex – a so-called DeFi storage platform – rug-pulled its investors by draining US$2.5 million in Binance Coin (BNB) from trading pools in the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). This exit scam, along with the Meerkat Finance example in the same month, caused a lot of controversy in the DeFi community, prompting other scammers to follow suit.

Earlier this month, the WhaleFarm token dropped almost 100 percent after developers drained liquidity pools filled with several coins, stealing over US$2.3 million.

Traders should be cautious when investing in a DeFi protocol and look for several red flags, such as exaggerated yield returns, a whitepaper that looks more like marketing instead of offering a solution to a problem, and anonymous developers.