Most of you have probably seen that, 3 days ago, there was an assumed rug pull by a decentralized finance protocol on the Solana network, called Luna Yield. Their website and all their social media just went dark out of nowhere. Some jokingly say at the speed of Solana... it was all gone. With them went presumably $6.9 Million of liquidity that was provided to the platform. This number is disputed and could be up to $10 Million.
Just so nobody is confused, Luna Yield has nothing to do with Terra (LUNA). It was just the name of the protocol.
SolPAD, an initial digital offering platform, where Luna Yield, only a few days earlier, had their IPO, has been updating the community and gathering proof of whether or not this was actually a rug pull and what happened. Though different anonymous sources have already stated that the assets were transferred, exchanged for ETH and than sent to a "decentralized tornado cash service".
I'm not going to go any further into detail as to what happened as that can be found on any crypto news site elsewhere. I'd rather focus on what this rug pull means, the first rug pull ever on Solana. Now, that might sound kinda "scary" to some people, but honestly speaking this is nothing when looking at both the bigger picture in Solana itself and crypto as a whole.
As with a lot of these incidents, it was caused by both the people that blindly invested in a closed-source protocol, which should be a red flag immediately, and a malicious group that took advantage of the uptrend Solana has been having recently. This Solana developer explained it extremely well and did an audit on the entire situation, definitely check it out, it's short or optionally just skim over it.
https://twitter.com/hoaktrades/status/1428531421107433473?s=20
What I've also been seeing a lot of is the attempts of news stations to pit the blame on Solana itself with outrageous titles and unnecessarily calling out an entire project. It's like if the program Photoshop was blamed for every time someone edited something out of a photo... makes no sense. This is the first of unfortunately many hacks/exploitations and whatnot that will likely strike users on the Solana ecosystem, it's our job to do the research and not blindly follow something cause it might have high APR or a nice looking site... that's the caveat of DeFi. Solana is a fantastic tool for devs but it can be used maliciously just like any other and as some have stated "they'll now rug pull you in a second instead of 15".
The counter argument I seem to get for this is that Solana should have a well enough designed system for projects to be easily auditable and hard to abuse. The thing is... it is, it was a mistake on the side of SolPAD and the people that put their trust into something this shady. This is proven by the fact that this is the first rug pull that has happened in it's year and a half of existence. Yes that time is technically shorter since dApps didn't just pop up right after it was launched, but there is also the fact that similar blockchains like ETH after having been hacked so many times get off scot-free and with this being a relatively small amount of money and making people more aware of the possibilities for scamming, I find it to be overblown.
I don't like to use FUD, since it makes me feel like I'm denying something, but in all honesty, I believe this is just overblown FUD to make Solana cheaper since most people missed the opportunity to buy in before the uptrend. I'm a firm believer in Solana and this has in no way changed that opinion, and it shouldn't make anyone else waver in their conviction either. It is a sad thing for sure, for anyone to lose money like this and that part we should never downplay.
Thanks for reading!