Your $APE Would Not Be Your Ape, if You Sold Your Bored APE.
Bizarre staking rules of APE cost 3 NFT owners to lose both their NFTs and $75K worth of APE tokens.
If you are an avid primate enthusiast, your APE token can earn your rewards now if you stake your #APEcoin to ApeStake.io. You can also put your Bored Ape/Mutant Ape NFTs into the stake pools. As of now, there has been about $40M worth of APE and NFTs being staked.
But there is a caveat: don’t sell your Bored Ape if you stake your APE token. Otherwise, you will lose all your staked APE to the buyer of the NFTs. There have been three victims of these weird “feature” that got rekt.
We summarize the transaction data in this spreadsheet.
You can view the 3 transactions’ token flow chart, as we will do later, the flash loans used by the arbitrageur, the NFTs involved, the originally sold prices of NFTs, who sold the NFTs and staked APE, these suckers’ labels, the amount of the staked APE, the flipped prices, the buyers who thought they got a good deal, and their labels.
Of course, you can find out the contract that the arbitrageur used to make $10K out of these 3 arbs.
Now, let’s walk you through how these miseries happened by using the first transaction as an example.
How the Fat Monkey Businesses Work
The first transaction made a profit of $1.1K with a cost of $46 as the gas fee. Yet the MutantApeYachtClub #8055 involved was sold for 18.1633 $WETH on Looksrare and flipped for 13.16 WETH on OpenSea. Using flash loans, the searcher successfully made a killing out of 3 transactions alike.
Here is the token flow chart of this one.
Let’s zoom in to see the details.
The “to” address in the figure is the contract used by the searcher.
Step 0-2: The searcher started a flash loan from dYdX, borrowing 18.1633 WETH, and unwrapped the WETH to ETH.
Step 3-6: The searcher paid 18.1633 ETH to LooksRare to buy the MAYC #8055 from 0x313, a.k.a. "Greedfulz" on OpenSea, including the fees, 0.2724 WETH for LooksRare. LooksRace wrapped the ETH here.
Step 7-10: LooksRare transferred the fee to Yuga Labs and 17.8 WETH to "Greedfulz" as payment. Next, the MutantApeYachtClub #8055 was sent to the searcher’s contact, as well as the staked 2,042 APE from ApeStake.io.
Address 0x532 in the figure is the entry of 1inch exchange.
Address 0x945 on the right of the chart is a WETH/USDC pool of ParaSwap.
Step 11-19: The searcher sent the 2,042 APE coin to 1inch. First, the tokens got swapped for USDC in ParaSwap, then USDC for WETH in a Uniswap V3 pool. Eventually, the exchanged 6.5872 ETH was sent back to the searcher.
Address 0x9f2 is oneboy.eth.
Step 20-23: The searcher sold the MutantApeYachtClub #8055 to oneboy.eth at the price of 13.16 WETH. The fees were paid to Yoga Labs and OpenSea, marked as EthereumFeeCollector in the picture.
Step 24-28: The searcher wrapped the 6.5872 ETH received for exchanging the staked APE and used it to repay the flash loan. Then this guy wrapped the left 0.9259 ETH and took it as revenue.
The calculation here is:
Revenue = Flip Price + Staked APE Swapped WETH - Org Sold Price - Fees(Yuga Labs + OpenSea)
The other 2 transactions of the contract follow the same pattern. If you find the 2 pictures below too small, visit their pages on EigenPhi.io.
It’s a “Feature,” Not a Bug?
It’s not surprising that this quirky staking model of APE has been stirring the pot. All the victims above paired their staked APE with their NFTs, which act as access keys for the staking APEs. Once the key is gone, the APE tokens are gone as well. This is by design.
Have you staked any APE tokens? Do you think this design is reasonable or not? Please leave your comments.
For another arbitrageur taking advantage of protocols, check out this guy who captured the price caching design defect to profit over $110k on MIM.
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