$60 million in 20 hours: how a nameless fork project fleeced investors before it even launched (AnubisDAO)

AnubisDAO had no website, no white paper, and no named team — only the idea of forking OlympusDAO and an active Discord chat full of enthusiasm. In 20 hours of selling its ANKH token, the project raised $60 million, which evaporated that same day along with its founders — the liquidity was moved to another wallet. It is one of the fastest and most structurally absurd rug pulls in DeFi history: investors handed money to a project that never managed to show a single product.

OlympusDAO, whose idea inspired AnubisDAO, was at the time regarded as an innovative "reserve currency" model, backed by its own treasury that was replenished through the sale of bonds and fees from liquidity pools. AnubisDAO promised to replicate this model, but without any technical foundation — there was no code audit, no vetted team, not even a basic description of how the protocol was supposed to work. Despite this, the community's trust, fueled by the general frenzy around Olympus forks in the autumn of 2021, allowed the ANKH token to raise 13,597 ETH — at the time around $60 million — in just 20 hours of selling.

The critical structural flaw was that full control over the shared liquidity pool was placed in a single developer wallet, instead of being distributed via a multisig or locked by a smart contract. Roughly 20 hours after the sale began, these funds were transferred to another, external wallet. The ANKH token became almost instantly worthless.

In the project's Discord community, mutual accusations began, along with attempts to figure out exactly who had access to the pool; one team member publicly claimed to have fallen victim to a phishing attack that had supposedly caused them to lose control of the funds. According to media reports, law enforcement agencies in Hong Kong and the United States got involved, yet no official identification or charges were ever made public — the developers remained anonymous.

The funds in the wallet to which the liquidity had been moved did not budge until eight months after the incident — but this led neither to the return of funds to investors nor to the identification of those responsible. The AnubisDAO case remains unsolved to this day.

Published 7 August 2024