TurtleDex hack — March 2021

TurtleDex, a decentralised storage project on BNB Chain, lost roughly 9,000 BNB from its liquidity pools on 19 March 2021, days after its token launched. On-chain observers, Decrypt and CryptoSlate all described the withdrawal as a rug pull by the project's own anonymous developers. No one has been charged or identified.

The team had run a presale from 15 March and used the proceeds to seed TTDX liquidity on PancakeSwap and ApeSwap. On the morning of 19 March that liquidity was withdrawn. The Twitter account @_DeFiStalker_ flagged the movements at about 09:30 UTC; holders trying to sell TTDX found the pools could no longer support the price and the token fell to near zero. The extracted BNB was swapped into ETH, split across nine addresses and deposited to Binance. The website, Telegram channel and Twitter account were all deleted the same day.

Reported values differ slightly because BNB was moving quickly at the time. Decrypt put the haul at about $2.4 million while CryptoSlate and CryptoPotato reported roughly $2.5 million for the same 9,000 BNB.

Jet Fuel Finance, a yield-farming protocol that had partnered with TurtleDex, said publicly it was as surprised as everyone else, delisted the project and opened channels for affected holders. Investors called on Binance to freeze the deposit addresses; Binance made no public statement at the time and no recovery has been reported.

The contract had been audited by TechRate on 21 February 2021, which reported no severe issues. That audit covered the contract code and not the team's ability to withdraw the liquidity it had provided.