AnubisDAO’s rug-pulled 13.5K ETH washes away on Tornado Cash

Nearly two years after the dog-inspired decentralized finance (DeFi) project AnubisDAO was rug pulled for almost $60 million in Ether (ETH), the stolen funds were siphoned away using Tornado Cash.

In October 2021, AnubisDAO raised 13,556 ETH from crypto investors owing to the predated Dogecoin (DOGE) trend. However, roughly 20 hours into the investment, the funds were sent to a different address, resulting in an instant loss for the investors.

Almost two years later, between July 15 and 16, the illicit funds were moved via Tornado Cash, a decentralized protocol that allows private transactions. The person or persons in possession of the 13,556 ETH divided and moved the funds in 100 ETH transactions, as shown in the screenshot below.

Blockchain investigator PeckShield signaled the alert at the time of the exploit when 13,556 ETH was worth roughly $60 million. At the time of writing, the stolen funds amounted to almost $26.2 million.

It seems the rugged @AnubisDAO funds are being washed via @TornadoCash https://t.co/DPoZ1ifSNX https://t.co/LvDSUsL6tS pic.twitter.com/mKfSdTE6D9

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) July 16, 2023

As the duped investors see their funds being siphoned into the abyss, a few remain optimistic about a highly unlikely scenario of getting a refund once the bear market recovers. As a result, investors are advised to do thorough research about a project and its founders before making any investment.

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Losses from the Multichain exploit forced lending protocol Geist Finance to shut down permanently. The latest post confirms the team does not plan to reopen lending and borrowing on Geist.

1/2 After confirmation from Multichain that the funds will not be recovered, we are announcing that Geist will not reopen. Because Chainlink oracles are tracking the value of real USDC, USDT, WBTC or ETH, they are not aware of the real value of Multichain assets.

— Geist Finance (@GeistFinance) July 14, 2023

A related technical complication makes it “impossible” for Geist Finance to reenable lending as doing so would result in bad debt for holders of non-Multichain coins such as Magic Internet Money (MIM) or Fantom (FTM).

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