Original Author: Leo, Jaleel, BlockBeats

Who would have thought that in just a few days, a new project that raised 921 ETH and was extremely optimistic by the community was locked up due to a wrong contract, and the project that raised 300 ETH was directly RUG, and DEFI TVL ranked first in the ecosystem The SyncSwap Chinese account was abandoned due to airdrop comments, and the second-ranked Velocore opened a new account and launched a new ID 0, which was accused of having a tendency to run away.

And these short-term intensive project running events all happened on the highly anticipated zkSync Era chain. zkSync Era has always been considered a very promising chain, and it is clear that it will issue coins next year.

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SyncSwap Chinese account deprecation storm

The source of the SyncSwap community discussion disturbance is several posts in the Chinese section of SyncSwap social media. In a recent post, SyncSwap apologized in Chinese and said: "The airdrop share is 15%, the airdrop is an airdrop, and the airdrop incentive is an airdrop incentive", and stated that the social media account has been abandoned by the SyncSwap account.

As we know, SyncSwap is a decentralized trading platform established by Matter Labs on the zkSync Era testnet. The protocol aims to become a liquidity solution at the trading layer level of the zkSync Era network, and the protocol is completely open source and composable. The Dex is license-free and completely open to the public. Anyone can swap tokens at will, become a liquidity provider on SyncSwap, and earn benefits.

Pushing back the time a few days ago, we found that the SyncSwap Chinese remarks came from the fact that the SyncSwap Chinese area once stated that there is no distinction between airdrops and transaction incentives, that is to say, transaction incentives for interactive groups, user interaction generally does not It consumes a lot of cost, but if transaction incentives are introduced, there is a high probability that it will eventually become what everyone calls "you will be rolled instead of wool". After this statement was released, it was resisted and abused by many users, and then SyncSwap Chinese area clarified again: "Airdrop 15% shares, transaction incentives and airdrops are separate, I guess transaction incentives will be FUD by the Chinese community, although I suggested adding Airdropped shares, but it didn’t work out.”

After a whole set of operations, I can feel that the Chinese area of ​​SyncSwap thinks highly of itself because of zkSync Era TVL, which accounts for a large share of the project, and the attitude of not caring about users at all also makes everyone feel less favorable to the project. Previously, SyncSwap was a good project whether it was interaction or experience. This project can connect to zkSync Era Mainnet, zkSync Era Tesenet, Scroll Alpha, and Polygon zkEVM Testnet. For airdrop users, it has a high TVL and can be connected to Multiple networks are "high-quality projects" that have the opportunity to realize one fish can eat more.

So what is the "loyalty token program" launched by SyncSwap? According to official documents, the loyalty program is designed to motivate users to trade and bring high returns. Traders will be rewarded with ySYNC tokens (which cannot be transferred). The more expensive the transaction costs, the more ySYNC. To obtain one ySYNC, the total number of ySYNC in the first phase is 90w, but as the number of participants increases, the price of ySYNC will drop, and ySYNC can be swapped into veSYNC. In the past, there were many projects that provided transaction incentives, but the final results were not satisfactory.

The operation of SyncSwap makes people very "incomprehensible". Most people use SyncSwap just for the airdrop of zks. Furthermore, the project is only to increase the transaction volume and number of transactions on zkSync Era, not because of how well SyncSwap is doing . Before Da Mao clarified the rules, Xiao Mao has already started to turn against users.

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The regular army is not on the field, and the local dogs are warming up first

On April 7th, 921 ETH ID 0 funds raised by Gemholic were stuck in the smart contract because zkSync Era was not compatible with the transfer function. The zkSync Era official immediately stated that it would assist in the recovery of funds, and then issued a statement saying that it had found a solution to unfreeze the contract. Then Gemholic said that after the unfreezing, the community will vote to decide whether to return eth or continue the project after opening.

And Velocore, which bears the "first ve token in the zkSync era", claimed before the sale that it would effectively solve the inherent problem of overflow sales by combining incentives with pledges. Therefore, the community was once hot, and the pre-sale was sold out in just a few minutes, exceeding expectations by 1800%, accumulating about 8,600 ETH, and TVL surged.

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Multiple projects have run away

Compared with Gemholic's funds being blocked and Velocore's suspected escape, corehunter, Syncdex, and ZksYncHero directly deleted their Twitter accounts, which more directly confirmed their escape.

At first, after corehunter raised 300 E, they closed the website and ran away.

In the next few days, some people questioned that the smart contract of Syncdex does not allow the withdrawal of funds in the pledge. At the same time, some people found that the official tweet of the project party was suspected to have been transformed from the handle of betgosu. The community questioned this in DC, but the official He kept silent, and even directly kicked out members who mentioned betgosu.

As the scam gradually came to light, the team could no longer give an explanation for the lie, first closed the reply, and finally deleted the account directly. SlowMist also issued a security alert: "The SyncDex project has been withdrawn, resulting in a loss of more than $370,000." SyncDex confirmed the leek-cutting action at 3:00 am UTC+8 time zone, and the official Twitter account has been deleted.

After investigation by the MistTrack team, it was found that these funds had been converted into Ethereum, transferred to the Binance Smart Chain, and then converted into BNB again, and finally transferred to the MEXC trading platform, and the initial funds of the project also came from the MEXC trading platform .

The running operation of ZkHero and SyncDex is almost the same. First, open the coin directly without any fuss, attracting community members to connect ZkSyncHero with a wallet and click to receive tokens, and the wallet will be stolen and emptied. In order to prevent such voices from being heard, ZkHero first disabled comments, and then directly deleted the account.

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The ecological situation is chaotic

The recent airdrop has led to higher and higher expectations, and the FOMO sentiment has also led to frequent interactions between zkSync Era and other L2s, causing zkSync Era to skyrocket in short-term TVL, number of wallets, and cross-bridge funds. The skyrocketing category data is not because of how well zkSync Era is doing or how well its ecological projects are doing, but it is just that ARB has brought the furious emotions that have not dissipated.

But for users, the premise of interactivity is to judge whether a project/chain/market is of high quality. Taking a step back, the judging criteria can even be lowered to "whether the project is developing rapidly", "whether the project party is really doing things". Arbitrum, which previously announced the airdrop, cannot be said to be of high quality, but at least there are some good projects on the chain, such as GMX, the leading DEX on Arbitrum.

For the community, taking advantage of the popularity of the $ARB airdrop, a bunch of fraudulent projects have landed on zkSync Era, making it even more difficult to identify serious projects. Some people also point out that zkSync Era is helping to promote the scam, and the ecology should bear certain responsibilities for "review" and "KYC".

Ecology thinks about this: "We are not promoting scams. If we know they are scams, we will not promote them. When we promote them, everything is fine. The best thing we can do is to pay attention to us immediately. Inform the community about the situation." At the same time, zkSync Era also hopes that the community can point out the scam as soon as possible, instead of waiting until something really happens and then complaining and starting to blame. In fact, most of the time these projects look legitimate and legit, until someone falls for it, it can be difficult to identify who is a scammer.

Doing projects should bring user groups into Crypto through their own hard power, rather than start "cutting leeks" after bringing users into Crypto at speculative moments. Because of the low running cost of zkSync Era, there have been so many running projects and chain reactions recently, the community has also had a great crisis of trust in all projects in the zkSync Era ecosystem, and has become more cautious and harsh on team members.

At the same time, some semi-real-name projects also complained: "The fundraising of so many running projects is more than that of our serious projects."

The team expressed that they were very frustrated and considered giving up all refunds. Finally, due to the retention of some community members, they chose to let community users participate in voting to decide whether to refund all and give up continuing to operate the project.

Some people in the Zkrocket community said that the reason for the lack of popularity is that the project party seemed to act too hastily in order to seize the track, and was too confident at the beginning. Some problems were encountered in the white list round, which led to the cancellation of most of the cooperation. Part of the original white list caused the IDO fundraising situation of the white list round to be unsatisfactory. But the project party is also more pertinent, and did not choose to make up the number by itself to fill up the remaining quota.

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Other DeFi Apps on zkSync Era

These events have also triggered some thinking about the zkSync Era ecological project. Apart from the leading DEX SyncSwap, are some other top-ranking DeFi applications on zkSync Era scams?

Let us use data to objectively evaluate these DEX applications of zkSync Era. According to DefiLlama data, the current TVL rankings on zkSync Era are after SyncSwap: Velocore, Mute.io, and SpaceFi.

According to DefiLlama's data, TVL is about 61.76 million US dollars. On the interface, it is simple and easy to operate, and you can score 8 points; the Swap function supports 9 kinds of tokens; the Gas consumption is 1.94 knives (this article takes 0.003 ETH as an example, and the swap is performed at almost the same time).

Looking at Pool again, we can find that the composition of the liquidity pool is relatively rich, such as USDC/ETH, BUSD/USDC, ETH/OT, etc. It should be noted that there is only one DEX in the market that supports OT, which is also the reason for SyncSwap's high TVL One; In terms of social media, SyncSwap has 270,000 fans, but due to the airdrop event, user favorability has declined.

In addition to SyncSwap, Velocore is the second-ranked DEX in the zkSync Era. It is also the price that we mentioned earlier because the airdrop rule is linearly unlocked and the price has plummeted. The team opened a new account to prepare for other IC0 projects.

Velocore is a Solidly fork DEX, based on Velodrome code, designed to reward users who provide liquidity and enhance the infrastructure of zkSync Era. The TVL is about 20.17 million US dollars; the interface is not simple, 6 points; the Swap function only supports 7 tokens, and the Gas is 2 dollars. In terms of pool depth, due to the ve mechanism, the liquidity pool is lower than SyncSwap; social media has 11,000 fans, which is not bad because it was a new social media in March.

Mute.io is a DeFi platform that builds liquidity for all zkSync Era ecological protocols, and its Dapp is Mute Switch, an AMM DEX w/limit order book, mining and bond platform. Mute is a solution to the zkSync Era protocol that properly incentivizes liquidity for its own use case. TVL is about 13.31 million US dollars; the interface is simple and easy to operate, up to 8 points; Swap: supports 11 kinds of tokens, and the Gas is 1.8 dollars. The APY on Pool is between 14% -71%. Of course, some high APYs come from some unknown token and WETH pairs; social media was created in March 2018, with about 62,000 followers.

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BSC, Arbitrum and Aptos

Not just zkSync Era, let us look back at 2020, when the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has been online for two months, many new decentralized finance (DeFi) projects have joined the BSC, at the same time, anonymous DeFi projects are running The road is also common.

After an automatic market maker (AMM) "earth mine" project called "Wine Swap" suddenly deleted social media information and transferred assets on the chain, causing users to "lose" a total of about 345,000 US dollars in funds, the security team of Binance Helping users recover about 99.9% of their lost funds.

In addition to Wine Swap, everyone must also remember Meerkat Finance on BSC. In 2021, the BSC DeFi project Meerkat Finance claimed on social media that the treasury contract was hacked and nearly $14 million in user funds were stolen. After the incident, the project’s official website was inaccessible and social media was closed.

Afterwards, the security team analyzed the attack address, and found that the incident was a premeditated phishing incident by the project party, and they ran away from the beginning; and in this incident, the culprit at the code layer was the "upgradable proxy contract" , causing the project party to have too much authority, and it is very easy to steal funds.

Let us go back to September 2021. At that time, Arbitrum had been online for two weeks. What is surprising is that it was not some popular DeFi protocol that started the launch of Arbitrum, but various DeFi protocols. Earth dog wild mine. Some hot tokens that were deployed on the Arbitrum network at that time have long since disappeared.

The same situation also happened on Aptos. The most famous RUG project on Aptos in 2022 is undoubtedly Mojito. Let us also briefly review the beginning and end of Mojito.

Mojito Market is a decentralized gambling DEX (betting) on ​​Aptos. Users can place bets based on daily online quiz items (such as sports events, political decisions, social quiz, etc.), usually there are two options, The relevant data and odds will be displayed on the interface after the user places a bet through funds. The project was strongly supported by Aptos at the beginning. Before Aptos issued coins, Mojito Market was one of the main channels for users to interact with Aptos. The project was initially obtained through test coins. Note, points are obtained every day, and the addresses with the highest total points for 10 consecutive days will receive the original token MOJO of the project. After the collapse of FTX last year, the project tweeted that due to the collapse of FTX and Alameda, Mojito had lost its project funds hosted in FTX and would suspend the development agreement. When the funds improved, it planned to redeploy MOJO on Ethereum to realize its multi-chain plan. Information will be updated at a later date.

Mojito Market was launched in the early days of Aptos, and gained attention and users with the help of Aptos airdrops. Later, Mojito DEX was launched to increase the liquidity of MOJO. However, due to the fluctuation of APT prices, the price of MOJO has never met user expectations. The project party promised to continue to increase liquidity , but most of the users have already sold their MOJO. For users, the project does not have any good progress and vision.

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The "project factory" hiding behind the new chain

The rise of an emerging field is always a mixture of dragons and snakes, mud and sand, and the prosperity of the market also brings opportunities for malicious actors. The launch of a new chain is no exception. Victims suffer losses.

It has even been circulated in the community recently that SyncSwap is the same team as the previous Aptos Rug project Mojito, and the Mojito Market project was also the main project where everyone interacted with Aptos last year. Later, Mojito Markets officially stated that due to the FTX crash, the project has lost its project hosted on FTX Funding, development of the protocol will be suspended.

As we can see, looking back at the initial stages of the launch of BSC, Aptos and Arbitrum, without exception, it is the same scene, and behind this seems to be inseparable from some "project factories" that haunt the new chain.

They especially like to hang out at the initial stage of the new chain. After harvesting a group of users who have flooded in due to the effect of the new chain, they close their accounts and websites, take away the liquidity of the community, and leave the market to share accounts. They continue to wait for the next public chain ecology . Just go around like this, change the project name, and change a few lines of code, but these "familiar" teams are still behind it.

They are usually the first batch of popular projects launched on popular public chains. They are anonymous and mysterious. They have no well-known investor platform, no endorsement, no big company audit, but there is no shortage of KOL's enthusiasm. The method is played vividly and vividly.

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zkSync Era takes more time

Go back to the zkSync Era ecology and look at the data on dune. When Arbitrum was launched in September, the value of ETH pledged was 370,000, while zkSync Era currently has a maximum pledged amount of 3,894.

The current situation of zkSync Era is that there are many ecological applications, but there are few mainstream and high-quality ones. The financing of more than 400 million US dollars alone cannot support its future development. It still needs some high-quality application support. There are indeed many projects ready to go. For DeFi, we may look forward to the launch of zkSync on Uniswap next.

Although in comparison, SyncSwap currently ranks high in the overall strength of the ecology, but as far as the entire ecology is concerned, regardless of other functions, just look at the Swap and liquidity pool of zkSync Era, and the top TVL rankings on zkSync Era Several DEXs are not perfect enough, and they are still far from those top DeFi protocols (Lido, MakerDao).

Compared with Arbitrum's GMX, SyncSwap still has a long way to go, and most of the current transaction data comes from the addresses of interactive zkSync Era airdrops. Of course, airdrop interaction data is also the source of data for most DeFi protocols, but for As far as SyncSwap is concerned, it is currently the only one, and it has begun to change some rules at will, which also shows that the project has a casual attitude towards users. And SyncSwap's loyalty program also reflects the project's expansion.

Let's take a look at how Ethereum, the most orthodox player in the public chain, does. This may give some reference answers for zkSync Era and other new public chains after that.

Since the initial stage of IC0, the ETH testnet Hackthon has been in full swing, and the Ethereum Foundation has been supporting some orthodox projects behind it.

As of May 2020, in the Ethereum ecosystem, more than 150 Ethereum projects have received a total of nearly 25 million US dollars in funding. Among them, the Ethereum Foundation is the largest funding organization, which has donated more than 21 million US dollars and issued 94 grants. Everyone knows that running projects are not supported and supported by Ethereum, which is one of the reasons why everyone knows that there are many running projects on Ethereum, but they still believe in the orthodoxy of Ethereum.

New public chains including zkSync Era also need to think more about how to prevent their ecology from being submerged in fraudulent and runaway projects, and support some serious, powerful, and background projects in the early stages of testing and launch. Holding some hackathon competitions allows some unruly anonymous dirt dogs to show their attitude in the early stage when they cannot control the influx of dirt dog projects, and isolate themselves from the position of the dirt dog project.

Of course, we all know that zkSync Era is one of the most anticipated and promising public chains on the ZK circuit, and it will take a lot of time until the day when zkSync Era really thrives.