Introduction

The price of ANIRAND dropped to almost zero on March 28th 2022 from a ath of 0.07 algo just a couple of days before. This happened because 99% of the anirand/algo staked on tinyman was removed in quick succession at March 28 5 PM UTC. This lead to a loss of faith in the anirand asset leading to the price of it crashing. To analyse the situation, we learn

1. what anirand was ?
2. What rugpull is ?

Anirand

ANI is a multi-utility token for the game. It is established as the main token value of the game, allowing you to stake, purchase limited summons, participate in summon draws, purchase properties and as a trading currency and fee for the auctionhouse. It will also be the governance token for game direction, and voting for the DAO treasury payout. As more ANI is being paid out in the form of presale vesting, staking, game features such as loot, a sustainable model has been formulated in order to maintain the dwindling supply of ANI.

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Rugpull

A rug pull is a malicious maneuver in the cryptocurrency industry where crypto developers abandon a project and run away with investors’ funds. Rug pulls usually happen in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, especially on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), where malicious individuals create a token and list it on a DEX, then pair it with a leading cryptocurrency like Ethereum, in our case algorand. Once a significant amount of unsuspecting investors swap their algo for the listed token, the creators then withdraw everything from the liquidity pool, driving the coin's price to zero. The coin’s creators may even create a temporary hype around Telegram, Twitter, and other social media platforms and initially inject a substantial amount of liquidity into their pool to cultivate investor confidence.

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Price analysis of anirand

The price of ANIRAND dropped to almost zero on March 28th 2022 from an ath of 0.07 algo just a couple of days before. One of the major piece of this rug pull was its swap activity on tinyman, So we look at all the swaps that occurred on tinyman.

We notice that there is a spike in the number of swaps on March 28th as we expected. There were atleast 1000 swaps made on that day which is significantly more than the rest of the days. However, when exactly did the rug pull happen ? We look at the swaps on an hourly basis to identify, when exactly it happened.

At 5 P.M UCT, around 300 swaps were made on tinyman's anirand/algo pool. This indicates the exact time of rugpull. When an user attempts to remove liquidity from the pool, he receives his staked algo and anirand with interest from the pool address( here,JO7VWMGSF7NSIWMIG3DIUL7DD3RVPIC7CBASGJLRFUMNTMXKGCPS2BYC7I). We us this to identify the users who removed their liquidity.

Holy!, it appears that only one of the liquidity provider removed 94% of all liquidity removed. while the second largest influencer removed around 4% of all liquidity removed. Together, the top three ere responsible for removing 99% of the liquidity.

Well, what did they do with so much money. We'll have to look at the transactions made by those addresses in the after math of the rugpull. So we whall look at the top 2 rug pullers

1. ANILPXQMFPC3Z3HWNJDQJOXIBQE462WVGV67GSYVPVDRFYPPTSNEPQ7ZUQ
2. W7CNM4SDEFNHLG6JAAOXPVP2NYITHJOJK4HNIDUQDIKWOD6KKXGYZ6FSLM

1. ANILPXQMFPC3Z3HWNJDQJOXIBQE462WVGV67GSYVPVDRFYPPTSNEPQ7ZUQ : It appears that the users transferred a bulk of his holdings (605k algos) to another account BCDUH4XUXK3L6SSOVEWDXSKRAYIP4SJ4P2NVPYNVK3D5U5QPKM7F3ZIQNE.
2. W7CNM4SDEFNHLG6JAAOXPVP2NYITHJOJK4HNIDUQDIKWOD6KKXGYZ6FSLM : This is surprising, as this user has not opted to move his funds rather he chose to buy/transfer some algos for trees and bird assets

How to avoid getting rugpullrf ?

1. Liquidity The easiest way to recognize a token that might eventually get the rug pulled is to check their total liquidity pool. DEXs will determine the price of a token in a liquidity pool against the available balances.
2. Stay calm during FOMO season Fear of missing out is one of the ways fraudulent investors set up a project to be rug pulled. They purchase massive amounts of their coin and drive the price up.
3. Matching names The Shiba Inu token has taken off recently and more people are investing their funds in it. A few crypto developers have created countless meme tokens since then and named them after the Shiba Inu coin. There is Mufasa Inu, Wakanda Inu, and a whole lot of other Inus on the market today. You need to be careful when investing in coins with names similar to other coins.

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