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"Barbarians at the Gate": Autofarm falls victim to malicious acquisition with close ties to multiple delisted projects.
PANews
特邀专栏作者
2023-06-29 09:00
This article is about 1579 words, reading the full article takes about 3 minutes
The malicious acquirer behind Autofarm may be related to Neblio and its financing party Dawnstar Capital, which have had close connections with multiple delisted projects on Binance.

Original author: Nancy, PANews

The encryption market also staged a "barbarian knocking on the door" drama. On June 26th, DeFi yield aggregator Autofarm announced on Twitter that it was maliciously acquired and will shut down the project. Although Autofarm did not disclose the specific acquirer, it mentioned in response to Twitter users that the acquirer is the same fraud group as the acquirers of Neblio and other projects.

After investigating Neblio, PANews found that the acquirer of the project and the CEO have close connections with multiple controversial crypto projects, and the tokens of these projects have been delisted from exchanges.

Tokens delisted by Binance after new financing, investors undisclosed

Autofarm is an established DeFi project that functions similarly to Yearn Finance's Yield Aggregator, aiming to optimize DeFi users' yield when interacting with other DApps in the DeFi space. Autofarm was initially built on BSC and gradually expanded to chains such as Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, and Celo.

DefiLlama data shows that shortly after its launch, the TVL of Autofarm once exceeded $2 billion, but the locked-in amount started to decline rapidly after May 2021, currently only around $12.63 million, a decrease of over 99.5%. At the same time, the price of Autofarm's token $AUTO also plummeted from a high of about $13,000 to around $17, a decrease of up to 99.8%.

According to public information, Autofarm has gone through 2 rounds of financing. In addition to obtaining initial funding from Platinum Capital, the projectAutofarm announced the completion of a $5 million private placement financing in January this year, but did not disclose the specific investors involved, only stating that this round of financing will be used for integrating advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, as well as developing new products and features, etc. However, in less than half a year, Autofarm revealed that it experienced a malicious acquisition at the beginning of this year and has been under new management for some time. Now, it will officially shut down its operations. Looking at Autofarm's tweet activity, it has been inactive since March this year, and many netizens have repeatedly left messages asking about the team's situation. In April this year, Binance announced the delisting of Autofarm's token $AUTO and explained in a notice that when a token no longer meets the listing standards or there are significant industry changes, a thorough project review will be conducted, and it may be delisted. Neblio and the acquirer are closely related to multiple delisted projects The crypto community is still shocked by Autofarm's experience, and the mysterious acquirer behind it has aroused market curiosity. Although Autofarm has not disclosed detailed information, we may find some clues from the blockchain platform Neblio mentioned by it. Neblio is a blockchain platform launched in 2017, focusing on distributed and high-performance. According to public information, Neblio (token: NEBL) has two investment institutions, namely ValueNet Capital and Dawnstar Capital. PANews verified with ValueNet Capital CEO Sonic Zhang, who stated that the institution did not participate in Neblio. Dawnstar Capital, on the other hand, is the financing institution officially announced by Neblio, which announced a $15 million financing led by this investment institution in October last year. Dawnstar Capital claims to be a venture capital firm established in 2017, based in Singapore. The fund has invested over $300 million in various assets and aims to provide funding for startups.And provide a complete set of financing, market-making, and marketing services for early-stage tokens and other illiquid assets, as well as major liquid assets listed on exchanges. Currently, the official website of Dawnstar Capital cannot be accessed, and there is no activity on its Twitter account.

Dawnstar Capital publicly invested in the cryptocurrency project QLC Chain (now renamed Kepple). The institution led the project with a $15 million investment in September 2021. Prior to the fundraising, QLC's Twitter account had no updates for nearly six months. With a market value of $10 million, the project raised $15 million, leading to speculation that the project was sold to Dawnstar Capital. Binance founder CZ's tweet indirectly confirmed this.

On April 2nd this year, Kepple accused Binance of delisting QLC without prior notice. In response, CZ replied, "Binance does not notify project teams in advance. The platform regularly delists projects that are inactive or have not made progress below certain standards. QLC has not made much progress in recent years, and he was informed that the project has been 'sold' to another project, which does not meet Binance's listing standards."

It is worth mentioning that QLC, NEBL, and AUTO are tokens that were delisted by Binance. Perhaps Binance had already discovered that the institution was using projects listed on Binance for speculative purposes.

Autofarm forced to close after being raided, malicious acquirers may have bought Binance shell projects multiple times

In addition, Neblio CEO Dives Evgenii also has significant connections to cryptocurrency projects. Dives Evgenii is not only the co-founder of a blockchain investment fund but also an advisor to multiple projects. On one hand, Dives Evgenii 

As the Chief Operating Officer of TokenClub's IC0 project in 2017, the token $TCT was delisted from Binance in October 2022 due to factors such as trading volume and liquidity, unethical/fraudulent activities, and the level and quality of project advancement. Dives Evgenii has close ties with the decentralized computing power market SONM. Neblio not only cooperates with SONM, a decentralized fog computing platform for IC0 projects, but has also promoted the increase in the value of its token $SNM through tweets. However, Dives Evgenii himself stated in a tweet that he has no relationship with SNM. According to the Ethereum browser, 76% of the total supply of $SNM belongs to the team. $SNM has also been downgraded from a listed token to the Innovation Zone by Binance, a market with higher trading volatility and risks.

From various signs, it is evident that there are indeed issues with Neblio and the acquiring party mentioned by Autofarm. There have been numerous cases of malicious acquisitions in the capital market, and the Autofarm incident may serve as a profound warning for cryptocurrency projects.


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