ZKsync issued a coin, but the ecological project parties ran away first to show their respect?

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24-06-11 17:33

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The "long-awaited" star project Ethereum L2 ZKsync is finally going to issue coins. Today, the community is full of users sharing the amount of ZKsync airdrop tokens. As of the time of writing, the pre-market trading market ZK on Whales is temporarily reported at $0.9. It is reported that the airdrop share of early users is 3.675 billion ZK tokens, accounting for 17.5% of the total.

In order to obtain airdrops, users have to interact diligently with ZKsync ecological projects, but just a few days before the coin issuance, a project party took advantage of the main network upgrade to abscond with the funds, and another "rug army" on ZKsync was added.

Users' fundraising was locked, and the project party "unlocked" and ran away

This time, the rug project is GemSwap, a decentralized trading platform on ZKsync, and the team behind it is called Gemholic.

Last year, Gemholic raised 921 ETH on ZKsync. However, due to the technical differences between ZKsync's Era network and the Ethereum mainnet at the time, Gemholic's fundraising method when it went online on ZKsync was to directly copy the Ethereum contract code. Due to the lack of sufficient testing of the ZKsync architecture differences, the transfer() function in the Gemholic contract generated fees exceeding the gas limit on ZKsync, resulting in passive lock-up of the raised funds.

Eden Au, director of research at The Block, noticed the problem and posted it on Twitter, "A project on ZKsync raised 921 ETH ($1.7 million) through token sales, but the funds are forever trapped in smart contracts. The Transfer() function works on Ethereum and other EVM chains, but not on ZKsync."

At the time, ZKsync officials quickly responded to this dynamic. And later proposed a response plan, "In this case, we found an elegant solution to a wider range of gas fee-related issues. It will require minimal changes to the protocol's gas non-metering, but allow full recovery of funds."

Gemholic also quickly made a commitment, writing on its official Twitter account, "We understand that many people have lost confidence, but we still believe that the ZKsync team can get things done. We need everyone to trust us. Once the agreement is confirmed, we will launch marketing activities and project pre-releases. We will also refund excess funds."

But now this tweet can only be viewed in the web archive. After being able to withdraw funds from the ZKsync mainnet, Gemholic cancelled his Twitter account.

More than a year later, the value of the 921 ETH raised by Gemholic has tripled to more than $3 million. On June 7, ZKsync began the mainnet upgrade. In version v24, ZKsync added a function that allows the transfer() function to be called normally when gas is not specified to improve compatibility with Ethereum.

This adjustment brought opportunities to the Gemholic project. Users who participated in Gemholic's fundraising thought they had waited for the day of repayment, but unexpectedly witnessed another runaway project on ZKsync.

The community discovered that Gemholic extracted 921 ETH from the project contract the day after the V2 upgrade and bridged it to the Ethereum mainnet. Subsequently, screenshots circulated in the community showed that Solomon, the founder of Gemholic, deleted all TG group messages, and the official Twitter account of Gemholic was also deleted. Obviously, the project party "untied" and ran away with the money.

ZKsync already has a "Rug chain" label?

This incident aroused the anger of the community. NSerec, the founder of zkMarkets, directly tweeted, "Today, $3.5 million was stolen by Gemholic, a company that falsely promised to refund investors for a whole year, but committed fraud after the funds were finally unlocked."

In fact, there are more rug projects on ZKsync than Gemholic. The community even complained that ZKsync is a "rug chain."

On April 13, 2023, the ZKsync ecological project SyncDex Finance was suspected of a rug pull. According to the relevant page information, users have pledged a total of more than 100 ETH and 98,444.8 USDC in the project. Its official social platform and Discord channel have been closed after the spread of doubts.

Less than a month later, a meme project called SHIBERA on ZKsync was accused of a rug pull. The project's official Twitter account was deregistered, and the liquidity pool on SyncSwap was also withdrawn. Before the rug, SHIBERA had announced that it would conduct an airdrop.

The rug event that impressed the community came from Kannagi Finance, a well-known DeFi project on the ZKsync Era. In July last year, the project's TVL plummeted from $2.13 million to only $24 overnight, and its official Twitter account was quickly deregistered.

Just two weeks ago, the ZKsync ecological lending platform xBank Finance was also suspected of a rug pull. It is reported that the TVL (total locked value) of the protocol is close to zero, and its official Twitter account has also been frozen, unable to obtain the latest progress. Previously, xBank Finance has been one of the more active DeFi projects in the ZKsync ecosystem.

At present, the ZKsync team has not made a clear statement on the user fund recovery plan. In this GemSwap incident, it may be quite difficult for users who suffered losses to recover the transferred funds. In the previous rug projects, ZKsync has not taken any effective actions.

This ZKsync airdrop is regarded as "big hair" by the community, but these rug projects also remind users of the crypto community that there are not only "treasures" in the exploration of the on-chain world, but also dark risks that exist at any time.