- Eminence Finance, a token being tested by YFI creator Andre Croje, was mistaken for a real token overnight
- Millions of dollars poured into the test token despite their being no information on it whatsoever
- A hacker minted and sold millions of tokens and crashed the price to zero
Eminence Finance, an unfinished DeFi gaming project that was deployed to the Ethereum network as part of a testing process, was mistaken for a real project and ended up losing millions of dollars overnight. The project, which consisted of nothing more than a smart contract and a single twitter post, was hacked within hours of going live, losing holders millions and exemplifying the stupidity and greed that has taken over the DeFi space.
No Info, No Website, No Community…No Problem
The entire Eminence project took place over a period of some six hours last night and began when eagle-eyed Uniswap traders spotted a new contract on the platform and a corresponding Twitter account:
— eminence.finance (@eminencefi) September 28, 2020
The Eminence Finance account, which consisted only of a couple of tweets for something called Spartans, immediately garnered attention, with the interest levels being further heightened when it was retweeted by YFI creator and so-called DeFi godfather Andre Croje.
Despite nobody knowing what Spartans or Eminence was and there being no website, community, GUI, Uniswap users began buying up EMN tokens in their droves:
🚨🚨🚨 THIS IS NOT A FINANCIAL ADVICE 🚨🚨🚨
4h hours ago this account and tweet was posted
since then :
– Almost 2M$ in a contract
– 468 “holders”
– 500k$ volume on uniswap
-1258 followersfor what?
– no Website
– no GUI
– no Discord
– nobody knows what this isa thread 👇 https://t.co/b1fMvfn6Sg
— Marc Zeller (@lemiscate) September 28, 2020
The token price spiked massively before slowly creeping upwards, doubling in price within half an hour around midnight before suddenly flash crashing to zero just ninety minutes later:
The reason behind the flash crash was attributed to a hack which took the project for $16 million, hardly surprising with an untested test smart contract.
Millions of Dollars Lost
Stories soon emerged of people having put six figure sums into the Eminence token only to lose everything, despite there being literally nothing to back it up but a picture on a newly created Twitter account:
There’s a guy that put $350k in, sold later for $700k then put the 700k$ back in right before the rug
— Moon (@crypt0moon) September 29, 2020
With Twitter engaged in an effort to understand what was going on, Croje finally offered some insight on Eminence and Spartans, admitting that it had the smart contract had been deployed as part of his usual testing process:
1/x First, the data;
1. Yesterday we finished the concept behind our new economy for a gaming multiverse. Eminence. As per my usual methodology, I deployed our staging contracts on ETH so we can continue developing on it.
2. Eminence is at least ~3+ weeks still away
— Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) September 29, 2020
Croje piped up again some time later with some better news for those who had lost out – he was going to refund some of the money lost by investors of his test token:
As I am receiving a fair amount of threats, I have asked yearn treasury to assist with refunding the 8m the hacker sent. The multisig is safer and as such I feel more comfortable with them having the funds. Funds will be returned to holders pre-hack snapshot. https://t.co/wbputn5hYD
— Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) September 29, 2020
This offer didn’t go down well with everyone however:
This is actually going to be a problem.
1. Those that dumped the $EMN post-hack will get the refunds while those who are holding it now will foot the bill.
2. The ones that fomo-ed in early are not getting punished. That set’s a very bad precendent
Not a fair outcome imo. https://t.co/UeoQzMXPH3
— SS (@sss4321_s) September 29, 2020
Eminence Should be a Lesson To All
All told, the six hour lifespan of the Eminence token is a perfect example of the greed and stupidity of some in the DeFi space at the moment. The concept of putting six figures into any DeFi project is lunacy itself, but to do so with something that is so incredibly vague in its concept in the hopes that others are going to be stupid enough to buy it off at a higher price you is a step beyond.
It’s no surprise that some thought the Eminence project was an experiment to see how stupid people could possibly be with their money in the DeFi space, and it may very well have turned out, quite by accident, to be just that.
