We’ve Got Some Explaining To Do.
And that is exactly what this medium article will accomplish. What happened? How did we go from one of the most exciting and bullish projects in the DeFi space to being labeled as a scam, an incompetent team, shady? And where do we go from here?
Our apologies for the long post, here. It has been an emotional week and we have plenty to say.
It Was Going So Well.
Incredibly, really. We had an enormous amount of hype surrounding the $BLISS presale. An AMA with Infinity Gainz, several Twitter marketers, and an interview with a private Patreon group made us the talk of the town for a bit. The team had paid for all of the marketing, website development and contract development leading up to $BLISS. We were all in on our idea, because we loved it.
It worked. People were excited that we offered an easy to use and valuable product. $BLISS was going to allow people to farm $wBTC right before Bitcoin began its explosive run to the moon. It seems, based on Bitcoin’s price action the last few days, that we had timed everything absolutely perfectly.
Other people seemed to agree with that, too. $VANA pumped to $1.26 per token. We sold out the $BLISS presale for 300 $ETH within an hour and a half, despite launching the sale at the worst time possible (in terms of time zones; it was 3 AM our time). The only issue, at first, was that some people had leaked the private presale link to their friends, which required us to make it public. No biggie, we thought, most of our $VANA holders of 500 or more had already had their chance to buy in.
And Then It All Went Wrong.
Calamitously. Horrendously. Humiliatingly.
We launched $BLISS and immediately locked 115 ETH in liquidity with Team Finance. We dealt with, what we thought, was a normal listing dump. But it quickly became apparent that this was far from normal. People in the Telegram began to claim that they sold but received no Ethereum for their $BLISS. For a moment, it looked and sounded like FUD.
And then people began sending their transactions from etherscan. It was true. Their transactions were being frontrunand they were recieving “Chi Gas Tokens” instead of Ethereum. None of us had even heard of Chi Gas Tokens. We didn’t understand what was happening. Our liquidity was being drained, our investors weren’t recieving any Eth, and we were in a state of panic.
We were attacked by a bot.
We told everyone to stop trading, so as not to feed the bot. We figured that this would be an issue we could resolve quickly, somehow. We reached out to everyone we knew. Auditors, developers, friends we knew had knowledge of these sorts of things. “People deal with bots all the time,” we thought. “We can get this back.”
And then people’s $BLISS began disappearing from their wallet.
If we were panicking before, at this point, it was like the world was ending. Massive amounts of money just walking away from our investors, without them even trying to make a transaction. It seemed unthinkable. But this, too, was true. Etherscan transactions began coming in again. Verifiable proof that people were literally having their money stolen from them.
Our contract was exploited. Our dev had made a mistake when testing the contract, and forgot to add a restrictive function back to the contract before deployment. One line of code.
Our developer told us to communicate to everyone that they should sell into WETH. The logic behind that decision was that it seemed a better solution to sell for a loss than to allow a bad actor to just take it all.
And then it was over. Our liquidity was gone. Our tokens were worthless. We had lost.
We were so close to greatness. So close to helping all of the friends we had made in the $VANA telegram and those outside of it make massive amounts of money. But we failed.
The Fallout
If you’ve never been a contributing factor to several hundred people losing shitloads of money, you truly have no idea how awful it feels. We were heartbroken. Our DM’s were flooded with terrible stories of loss. Most of these people had gotten into this situations because of the marketing we had performed; that I personally, to a large degree, had performed. I cried for the first time since I lost my best friend to suicide two years ago. As someone who has, on occasion, dealt with bouts of depression and anxiety, I considered ending it all for a moment.
Everyone, obviously, thought we were scammers. That this was an inside job. That we had stolen everyone’s money and were lying about our pleas of innocence and ignorance. Kasper and I received several death threats. I vomited.
I understand why they thought that. It is one of the easiest explanations for what happened here. If I were on the other side of things, I probably would have thought the same thing.
But it just isn’t what happened. I’m in law school with a lucrative job lined up after graduation; Kasper has a family and a great career. Many people in this space know our true identities. We would never, and I mean never, jeopardize our futures, our livelihoods and our consciences to steal people’s money. It isn’t just evil and manipulative and disgusting. Given our real life situations, it just wouldn’t make sense.
Our developer didn’t scam anyone either. He will be coming into the Telegram soon to say hello and clear the air, but he has two massive, active projects with large communities who trust him deeply. He doesn’t need to scam for money. He made a mistake and someone exploited it. That is the extent of his wrongdoing in this situation. He is, normally, one of the very best developers in this space. Cyotee trusts him and is working with him as we speak on one of his projects, for whatever that is worth to the community.
We Needed To Do Something To Make It Right.
Many projects, in this situation, relaunch their token on v2, allow their prior investors to dump on their new ones, and let their project wither away into silence. Other projects, less human ones, simply write up the situation to “risks of the market,” and don’t do a thing to make it right by those who trusted them to deliver.
That’s not our style. People should have autonomy and agency when it comes to how their money is handled. We decided, therefore, to provide our investors with a chance to get their money back, if they wanted to leave us and the project behind them.
But how? Luckily, we had 115 ETH in our multisig which was meant to go towards $VANA buybacks following the $BLISS launch. We could certainly use that in its entirety for refunds. But we had lost 115 ETH. It wasn’t like we had that kind of money off hand to just issue a full refund. Our developer had used about 50% of his fund for deployment and testing and all of the other costs that go along with writing two contracts ($BLISS and $BLISS Staking) and releasing a token (he had 12 ETH left over from his cut of 30 after paying his share of refunds and funding the gas). Our team cut ended up around 34 ETH. All in, then, we had around 161 $ETH to work with. For a presale that lost 300 $ETH worth of investors money, as well as everyone who bought off Uniswap after listing.
We provided a refund form in the Telegram to attempt to try to organize all of the chaos that ensued. Everyone was livid, many demanded a refund NOW. The refund form offered investors two options: (1) get a refund in $ETH for 50% of the money you lost; or (2) hold for v2, and recieve the equivalent of your investment in $ETH in $BLISS v2 tokens. As was to be expected, the vast majority of people took the $ETH option. The form accumulated 241 $ETH requested for refund, with around 100 $ETH worth of $BLISS v2 tokens requested. The final number for $ETH requested for refund was closer to 270 $ETH, as some of our larger Uniswap investors seemed to have filled the form out wrong and were disqualified, but we ended up refunding them as we weren’t going to refuse people their money over a clerical error. (If you would like proof of these later transactions DM me and I will refer you to the recipients of the refunds. These people were vocal in the Telegram after they received their refunds because they were often very sizable).
We used all of the money in the multisig quickly. Over 95 $ETH was refunded to Presale investors on the first night of refunds. The remaining 20 $ETH was used to pay back Uniswap buyers. And an additional 15 $ETH was refunded used from the other funds we have remaining. We got it all done within 4 days of the exploit.
In total, this leaves us with about 31 $ETH to use for $BLISS v2. We are so thankful to the 27% of our $BLISS investors have trusted us to deliver this new and improved version of our idea. We will use the remaining $ETH to deliver our promises to you.
This money will go to Bliss v2’s contract development, deployment, audits for Vana, Bliss’s token contract and Bliss’s staking contract, website redesign, and marketing for $BLISS v2. We will be entirely transparent about how and when this money is used.
We hope that the community can see that we are trying to do absolutely everything we can to make this right. This was the only way we could compensate victims and still move forward with $BLISS v2. Thankfully, all of this happened when $ETH pumped, resulting in those who were refunded receiving an almost 70% USD refund. If the person was refunded for a presale purchase, they will be receiving an additional 10% in $BLISS v2 tokens. We know it was a frustrating few days for everyone, and we truly appreciate your willingness to work with us. Your patience was a light.
What Comes Next?
Audits, partnerships, and everything else we can do to make our future investors secure in investing in our tokens and ecosystem.
We need to restore the community’s trust in us as a team and $VANA as a project. The first priority of our ecosystem from this point forward will be security and auditing of contracts.
We have already paid War on Rugs to audit $VANA, and will have him audit $BLISS v2 and $BLISS staking prior and after any contract deployment. In addition to Shappy, we have been in communication with Arcadia as well as two other third party audit teams, Certik and Omniscia, via our new partner for $BLISS v2’s launch (to be announced tonight).
$BLISS v2 will launch early next week.
Our AMA with TGH is being rescheduled today and will be announced tonight upon their response.
Conclusion
In the truest meaning of the word, we are sorry. We know how excited everyone was about $BLISS’s launch — believe us, we are too. All that we wanted to do was give everyone a chance to farm Bitcoin and enjoy the beautiful bull run it is having with us. It was absolutely unacceptable that our token led to the loss of investor’s funds. We’ll still do that. $BLISS v2 will launch, and those who decide to show us faith will be rewarded. We are deeply thankful to all of our investors, either in $VANA or $BLISS or both, for their understanding. We can’t wait to close this dark chapter of $VANA’s history and forge on to a brighter future than we even pictured before.
Trust is earned, not given. Stay with us. We’ll earn your trust back and won’t let you down.
Love,
The $VANA Team
