Stable Controversially Pre-Fills $825 Million Vault

Following the initial success of Plasma, the Bitfinex-backed Layer 1 blockchain, traders and investors have been looking at Stable as the next stablechain opportunity. However, when Stable opened up public deposits to its capped vault yesterday, retail users found that the team had pre-filled the vault before the public even had a chance.

Notably, $500 million of the total $825 million cap was pre-filled by a cluster of ten wallets directly linked to the Stable Vault owner, implying that the team took 60% of the initial allocation.

Stable has not released any details as to why this was done, but some who are giving it the benefit of the doubt claim that the pre-fill was funded by its partner companies, such as Concrete, Morpho, Pendle, and Frax, though this appears unlikely.

Some of the early contributors were most likely tracking wallets onchain and snuck into the deposit vault before the announcement. However, most of the large deposits were funded via multi-signature wallets, indicating that teams likely were on standby with advance knowledge of the launch.

The team hinted that there would be an activation of some kind on Oct. 23, but exact timing and launch details remained unclear. Stable ended up unveiling the $825 million capped deposit vaults at 9:10 pm EST, but those who opened the website found that the vaults had already been almost filled by fewer than 200 users, with most of them contributing almost 30 minutes prior to the public announcement.

Stable CEO Brian Mehler posted on social media after the raise hit its hard cap, completely ignoring the onchain evidence of pre-deposits led by the team.

“We are just getting started…Get ready to be part of the next chapter in global payments with @stable, built for trust, scale, and reliability. More ways to get involved. Stay tuned,” he wrote.

Stable did not immediately respond to The Defiant’s request for comment.

Despite the similarities between Plasma and Stable, which are both Bitfinex-backed stablechains, those involved with Plasma have quickly distanced themselves from Stable following the controversial launch.

Sun Raghupathi, the cofounder and CEO of Veda Labs, which assisted with the Plasma launch, blasted the Stable team on X, saying, “In the Plasma predeposit, we took great pains to hide the contracts until the public announcement. Deposits were even blocked in the smart contract. This level of blatant disregard is criminal. Send this sh*t to zero.”