LooksRare Fork Sudorare Rugs for $800K Despite Crypto Twitter Warnings

Developers behind non-fungible token (NFT) platform Sudorare rugged users for over $800,000 in various cryptocurrencies Tuesday before deleting the project’s online footprint.

Sudorare was a fork of decentralized NFT marketplace SudoSwap, known for its liquidity pools for NFTs and cheaper gas fees, and LooksRare (LOOKS), another NFT marketplace that rewards users for their participation on the platform. Both projects have gained popularity among crypto circles in the past year.

Sudorare offered a yield farm to users who staked LOOKs, XMON and wETH for its own tokens over one week.

However, blockchain data from Tuesday morning shows Sudorare developers illicitly emptied the LOOKS liquidity pool just six hours after it went live, swapping over 1 million LOOKS for 154 ether and 60,000 USDC in one such transaction, and thus pulling off a colloquial “rug pull.” The developers stole over 514 ether in all, valued at just over $815,000 at current rates.

In decentralized finance (DeFi), rug pulls are scams where the developers conduct legitimate work on a blockchain and then drain the liquidity pools from the project, essentially "pulling the rug" from under investors and causing a sharp fall in related tokens.

The rug pull occurred despite several Crypto Twitter users previously warning against investing in the Sudorare project in the past week, flagging its tokenomics, the presence of fake online followers and high yields offered to retail users.