🧛‍♂️ The Great Vampire Attack

The Scene: DeFi Summer 2020

Cast your mind back to the wild, lawless summer of 2020. Everyone was locked inside, “stimmy” checks were hitting, and a new craze called “Yield Farming” was born. Fortunes were being made and lost overnight on food-themed projects like YAM, Pickle, and Cream.

At the center of this universe was Uniswap. It was a beautiful, simple, and revolutionary protocol. But it had one “flaw”: it was a pure, “public good.” The founder, Hayden Adams, hadn’t released a token. This meant the users who supplied billions in liquidity and paid millions in fees got nothing but trading fees. The community had no power.

The stage was set for madness.

The Master Plan: Enter Chef Nomi

In late August, an anonymous developer named “Chef Nomi” appeared. They took Uniswap’s open-source code (which is perfectly legal), copied it line-for-line, and launched “SushiSwap.”

It was an identical-looking DEX, but with a devious, vampiric twist.

Chef Nomi created the $SUSHI token. And the only way to get this new, valuable token was to provide liquidity… on Uniswap.

This was the genius of the “Vampire Attack.”

1. Chef Nomi told users: “Go to Uniswap, deposit your money, and get your Uniswap LP (Liquidity Provider) tokens.”
2. “Then, bring those Uniswap LP tokens over to my website, sushiswap.org (now sushi.com), and ‘stake’ them here.”
3. “As a reward for staking your Uniswap tokens with me, I will pay you 10x the normal amount of $SUSHI tokens.”

The plan was audacious. It was like Coca-Cola asking people to buy Pepsi, bring the receipt to a Coke store, and get free shares of $COKE stock.

And it worked. Crypto madness took over. In just days, over $1 BILLION worth of Uniswap’s liquidity was pledged to SushiSwap’s smart contract, waiting for the final kill.

The Heist: Draining the King

Chef Nomi had set a timer. After two weeks, an event called “The Migration” would trigger.

At the chosen block, the SushiSwap smart contract would automatically, in one giant transaction, take all the $1B+ in Uniswap LP tokens it had collected, cash them out of Uniswap, and instantly deposit all that raw ETH, LINK, USDC, etc., into the new SushiSwap exchange.

It was an automated, hostile takeover. The vampire was about to drain its victim dry. As the timer ticked down, the crypto world watched, horrified and mesmerized.

The Betrayal: The $14 Million “Rug Pull”

This is where the chronicle turns dark. Just days before the migration, with $SUSHI’s price soaring and the project’s success all but guaranteed, Chef Nomi did the unthinkable.

As the “admin” of the project, Chef Nomi controlled a “dev fund” worth about $14 million in $SUSHI. In one move, he sold all of it for ETH.

The price of $SUSHI crashed over 70% in an hour. The community was in chaos. It was the ultimate “rug pull.” The man who promised a “community-owned” exchange had just dumped on his own community and walked away with $14 million. The project looked dead.

The Madness Gets Weirder: SBF to the Rescue?

This is where the story goes from madness to pure absurdity.

As the project imploded, a new “chef” stepped in to save it, someone the community begged to take control. That man was Sam Bankman-Fried, the head of FTX.

In an ironic twist of history, SBF was seen as the adult in the room. He took control of the SushiSwap keys from Chef Nomi, oversaw the “Great Migration” (which successfully moved over $800 million from Uniswap), and helped set up a new, community-run government for the project.

And then, in the final, unbelievable twist, Chef Nomi, shamed by the entire industry has returned all $14 million of the ETH to the treasury. He apologized, said he’d “f-ed up,” and vanished.

The Legacy of the Vampire

The attack, despite the betrayal, was a wild success. It proved that a “vampire attack” could work. It scared Uniswap so badly that just one week later, Uniswap airdropped its own $UNI token to every user who had ever used the platform, kicking off the biggest “crypto stimulus” in history.