NFT exchange SudoRare suffers $800,000 ‘rug pull’ six hours after launch

SudoRare, a decentralized non-fungible token (NFT) exchange, has gone offline on Tuesday — six hours after it launched — with tokens worth over $800,000 removed from the platform’s wallet address.

Data from PeckShield show the funds have already been sent to three different wallets. PeckShield has identified one of the wallets as belonging to a user of crypto exchange Kraken.

PeckShield and other commentators have speculated that the founders of the project were behind its collapse. This is because they were the only people likely to have access to the liquidity in the pool; the hack happened very shortly after launch; it was an anonymous team and the team deleted all of the social media accounts and related websites moments after the event. As such, it’s likely it was what’s known as a “rug pull” — an event when a project’s founders take all the money they can from their own project and abandon it.

The rug pull drained ether (ETH), looksrare (LOOKS), and USD Coin (USDC) tokens from the NFT exchange platform. The LOOKS and USDC tokens have already been swapped for ETH on Uniswap. In total, the rug pull drained 519 ETH ($815,000) from the platform.

Tuesday’s rug pull comes barely six hours after the NFT platform’s launch. The platform’s social media accounts and websites have also been taken offline, including its Medium blog page. There were several warnings on Twitter that SudoRare may be a scam project before the rug pull happened. Critics mostly pointed to the anonymous team as the reason for their suspicions.

SudoRare was supposed to be a combined fork of SudoSwap and LooksRare. Both are NFT marketplaces. SudoSwap functions as a decentralized exchange for trading NFTs, one that allows for the creation of liquidity pools for NFT collections. LooksRare is more of a standard NFT marketplace (like OpenSea) but it has a native token called LOOKS used for rewarding users who buy or sell NFTs on the platform.

SudoRare was supposed to combine these two functions, allowing users to stake SR — the project’s native token — to earn ETH trading fees on the platform. That was, until all the money disappeared.

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