Pig Slaughter - Disaster Launch of The Piggy Bank
The Animal Farm was my first dive into Yield Farming. It was launched last month by ForexShark, a developer well known and trusted for projects such as The Drip Network. My first investment in the platform was in one of the Liquidity Pools that paired Binance Coin (BNB) with their native token DOGS. From this pool you earn their governance token PIGS which you can stake for the stable coin BUSD.
You can read about getting into the Animal Farm here and my follow up article here.
I really enjoyed learning about yield farming and getting involved with this platform. The community around it was very excited and the developers loyal following made it seem like a can't miss project good for the long-term. Everything was going pretty well, until the launch of the latest area of the platform - The Piggy Bank which I wrote about here.
This heavily anticipated part of The Animal Farm was billed as the "world's first ever non-inflationary variable time staking annuity". Essentially, you would put in a liquidity pool of BUSD and DOGS that you would use to create Piglets. Every day you would be able to compound or cash out the Truffles that the Piglets produced at the rate of about 3% a day. If you locked these Piglets up for one week to three years, you would get a multiplier that would really boost returns. The hype to the launch grew and grew with YouTubers foaming at the mouths to jump in. Personally, I was excited to get involved with the Piggy Bank as well...
In retrospect, so many red flags surrounded this project but hindsight is always so easy after the fact and as they say "20/20".
My goal was to get in right away so I followed the countdown to Tuesday, March 1st at noon EST with much anticipation. I had my LP pairs already made on PancakeSwap and was ready to go the second it was live. The timer hit zero and for some reason I couldn't convert my LP tokens to Piglets. What is going on here? Finally we hear from ForexShark himself on his Telegram page and we have a slight delay. Minutes passed and then hours, finally we get word that another counter was put in place and the new launch date would be Thursday, March 3rd again at noon EST. Well OK, I can wait two more days - ugh!
The launch day finally arrives. I'm on a Telegram voice chat with over a thousand of people waiting for the launch like the cult followers of Heaven's Gate in their Nike shoes waiting for the UFO to arrive. Once again, the timer went to zero and nothing happens. Now the cult was turning more into an angry mob and we eventually find out that we would have to wait another 24 hours.
So on Friday, March 4th at noon you can guess what happens - another delay. I wait for an hour or two before deciding to head out and take care of a few things I've put off for most of the week waiting for the launch of The Piggy Bank.
Before I describe the launch, let's take a peek behind the curtain at a few other red flags. First, there is no white paper on the site explaining this feature. Those of us in the community really know little about the mechanics behind the Piglets, Truffels, timelock, etc. A lot of confusion exists, and not a lot of answers ever come forth. The developer had done a number of AMA's in the days leading up the launch, which would last hours, but didn't answer many of our basic questions. Those having concerns on the main Telegram page were being banned left and right, a bad sign. You could say there were as many flags as an opening ceremony of the Olympics. Still, we remained steadfast in our belief in ForexShark and this project.
I finally wrap up my short errands, get home and fire up The Animal Farm. The Piggy Bank had already launched and I missed it despite being glued to the computer most of the past week. Oh well. I try to convert my LP tokens to Piglets but it fails. Apparently the price had changed and now I would get less Piglets than ten seconds ago. I tried again, same problem. My heartbeat begins to race. Finally I'm able to purchase Piglets - I'm in. Other than missing out on a few Piglets the last minute or so, I'm pretty excited until I check the Discord and Telegram channels after my purchase.
It seems those that got in right at the launch scored significantly more Piglets per Liquidity Pair than those of us who got in not long after. We are talking huge multiples of Piglets. Wait, I got screwed for finally taking a break figuring the launch would be delayed even longer. Apparently, I wasn't alone in my frustrations.
As you can imagine, this caused major ripples throughout the community. Those fortunate to get in early were selling their Truffles making thousands, if not tens-of-thousands, if not hundreds-of-thousands in the process. As a result of these sales, the prices tumbled. Not only of the Piglets, but of the native tokens PIGS and DOGS many had invested in the other parts of The Animal Farm as well. While I had been in the green before the launch, now my initial investment was down pretty significantly and dropping fast.
The developer has since told us that someone used bots to buy lots of Piglets and game the system (specifically the contract). Many conspiracy theories abound to the level of truth in this only adding to all the juicy gossip now surrounding the launch of The Piggy Bank. ForexShark has since paused everything within the AnimalFarm so you can no longer buy or sell the tokens within the platform and the "botters" in question have been blacklisted. Who knows what is true at this point? Everything is now on hold until version 2 of the farm is launched with new PIGS and DOGS tokens with the promise of our old tokens being migrated over. Other issues with The Piggy Bank, including compounding fractional shares of Piglets, will also be addressed.
Much unrest exists in all those that invested in The Animal Farm and more specifically The Piggy Bank. Fortunately, because I am new to this I only put a relatively small amount into the one of the farms and even less into The Piggy Bank. In fact, I had pulled out the PIGS I had earned from the farm to put into The Piggy Bank even further reducing my personal exposure. Even if I lose every cent, I have learned so much from the process I can view this as a very cheap educational experience.
My guess is that this will eventually all get worked out and I will eventually make a tidy profit from this farm so I plan to ride things out for the next year or so. I'm curious, if nothing else, to see how it all plays out. I will use what I have learned to invest in other DeFi platforms on the various blockchains. I still say yield farming is the most fun things I have done in crypto and all the drama with this project has only added to excitement of it all. As they say, no risk - no reward. No pain - no gain.
I've only put risk capital into this project and had more risk capital allocated to add into the project once I had a full understanding of all the mechanics. As you can guess, I've put this on hold for awhile and will look into other platforms to experiment with. If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears and ready to do some research.
