Over $600K Vanishes From DeFi Project Blur Finance; Developers Disappear

Another day, another apparent rug pull.

The developers behind Blur Finance, a yield aggregator intended to leverage different decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and strategies to maximize user profits, appear to have suddenly abandoned the project and deleted its social media channels.

More than $600,000 worth of tokens vanished in the process, security firm PeckShield said on Wednesday. Blur ran on the BNB Chain and Polygon networks.

#PeckShieldAlert #rugpull Seems Blur Finance $BLR rugged. $BLR has dropped -99%. https://t.co/phmi0OPIbphttps://t.co/qk5c0UF6fY
The social media channel deleted and ～$600k were taken on polygon and BNBChain.
Thanks @Adam0658 for the intel. pic.twitter.com/e1oHDKkDVa

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) August 10, 2022

The protocol's website is returning an invalid certificate, and a link to its Discord channel results in an "invite invalid" message.

The move is a textbook rug pull, a scam carried out by developers who launch a working decentralized finance application and carry out social media marketing to popularize it before issuing a token and listing it on a decentralized exchange (DEX). After investors have purchased the tokens in the hopes of a positive return, the developers shut up shop and disappear.

The liquidity that investors provide can run into millions of dollars. Last week investors in Polygon-based Web3 game Dragoma appear to have been subject to a rug pull valued at $3.5 million. A Chainalysis report previously estimated that rug pulls totaled some $2.8 billion in 2021 alone.

Blur had over 754 holders on BNB Chain, trackers show. The project recently integrated with Polygon and provided annualized yields of some 4,000% as of last week. The contract was created July 7.

The project’s BLR token fell 99% following the rug pull, trading at $.00064 at writing time. The price peaked at 6 cents last week.