AnubisDAO funds move for the first time, eight months after rug pull

Quick Take

  • Funds from the AnubisDAO rug pull are on the move for the first time as the hackers have funnelled 1,018 ETH via Tornado Cash.
  • $60 million was stolen from the AnubisDAO project in October 2021.

A wallet address associated with last year's suspected AnubisDAO rug pull has begun to move funds from the heist, according to an alert by PeckShield on Friday.

Etherscan data shows an address it had tagged as AnubisDAO Liquidity Rug 3 moving a total of 1,097 ETH ($1.3 million) to another address. The intermediary address has since laundered 1,018 ETH ($1.18 million) via Tornado Cash.

AnubisDAO was a dog-themed crypto project promoted as a fork of OlympusDAO. The project raised 13,597 ETH, worth $60 million at the time, by selling its native token ANKH to investors.

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However, the project saw its liquidity drained in October in a suspected rug pull, where the developers behind the project abscond with the money. The funds raised were sent to a different wallet address, which then consolidated them into the tagged address mentioned earlier. The rug pull effectively crashed the price of the ANKH token to zero as there was no liquidity for trading the coin.

Today’s fund transfers are the first from the wallet since the theft occurred 236 days ago. The tagged wallet still holds 12,500 ETH from AnubisDAO as of the time of reporting, worth $14.5 million at today’s ether price. Ether has lost 70% of its dollar value since the heist and as such the total funds siphoned now have a market value of less than $16 million.


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About Author

Osato is a news reporter at The Block as part of the crypto ecosystems team that focuses on DAO governance, staking, blockchain layers, and DeFi. He was previously a news reporter at Cointelegraph. Based in Lagos, Nigeria, he enjoys crosswords, poker, and attempting to beat his Scrabble high score. Follow him on Twitter at @OsatoNomayo.