This Ethereum DeFi trader turned $30k into $1.1m in just five days — or did they? – DL News

The apparent success of a DeFi trader turning nearly $30,000 into $1.1 million in five days has sparked widespread fascination.

The anonymous trader, who owns the Ethereum wallet 0x88, invested in Pandora, a buzzy Ethereum token and NFT hybrid. And DeFi users keen on monitoring onchain data — DeFi trading is transparent thanks to public blockchains — noted their purported $1 million earnings.

The tale of instant riches inspires hope in many punters of DeFi.

But a closer examination by DL News suggests the situation is more complex than initially thought.

Analysis of the trader’s wallet history shows that they didn’t market-buy all the Pandora tokens they eventually sold; rather, they received more than half of the tokens from Sablier.

Sablier is a DeFi platform used by projects to distribute tokens on a payroll or as part of a token vesting schedule. Generally, tokens are only vested if there was a token pre-sale or a similar arrangement.

But according to messages seen by DL News on a Telegram channel run by the Pandora team, a pre-sale was not conducted. Pandora did not immediately respond to DL News’ request for comment.

Pandora emerged last week as the first implementation of the new — untested and experimental — ERC404 token standard that exists as both a token and an NFT.

In order to hold the NFT a user must buy at least one whole fungible token. If they then sell that token, or a fraction of the token, the NFT is burned, or removed from the supply.

Opening Pandora’s box

The mysterious trader held a total of 78 Pandora tokens worth $2.5 million at the token’s peak. Although the trader did purchase tokens in the project early, their gains did not all come from market purchases. Most of the gains came from the tokens received via Sablier.

The story began on February 4 when the Pandora project gave them what’s called a Sablier Lockup NFT, which represents ownership of 45 Pandora tokens.

After receiving 45 Pandora tokens via Sablier, the mysterious trader also made a series of token purchases. They bought 33.59 Pandora tokens at an average price of $889, before spreading their sales over 35 transactions as the token rallied some 3,500%.

The trader’s wallet had direct interactions with a few other wallets, which indicates they may be connected in some way, either the same individual controls them all, or the wallets are part of a larger group of individuals.

The first, wallet 0x22, seems to be a transit wallet without any special features. Another wallet, 0x0d has a balance of $172,000 and is actively airdrop-farming on protocols like Manta, Blur, and Blast. Lastly, wallet 0x2c, which is only two days old, already holds almost $1 million — coming directly from the trader’s Pandora wallet.

Since launching on February 2, the project has done over $550 million in trading volume on decentralised exchanges and over $3 million in volume on NFT marketplaces on Ethereum.

The success of Pandora has also led to dozens of other projects launching ERC404 collections, resulting in gas spikes on Ethereum mainnet and numerous suspected rug pulls.

The total market value for ERC404 projects sits at $151 million, with nearly $21 million in total trading volume in the last 24 hours.

Ryan Celaj is DL News’ New York-based Data Correspondent. Reach out with tips at ryan@dlnews.com.