WAX Blockchain: The Disturbing Case of Bobocoin and DeFi WAX in General
If you've never heard of a WAX account named bobocoin_bp0x0, that would not be surprising, but if you've spent any amount of time in the WAX NFT universe, then you've probably seen his NFTs, and maybe even obtained one.The Bobocoin project is not new in technical existence, and the project owner has been generating NFTs and related tokens for a few years now. However, the project has been a sleeper until probably about the end of 2023 when one of the tokens, COFFEE, started making a value rise against the blockchain flagship token, WAX. Once it started getting into the range or 10:1 per WAX, people started paying attention. And, in a similar fashion, lots of activity started happening with liquidity pools that carried the related Bobo coins, particularly in the Taco LP portfolio of MEAL.
Unfortunately, the whole COFFEE run up turned out to be fixed. It was a pump and dump, with heavy staked positions losing their WAX to a suddenly valueless token.Bobocoin_bp0x0 and all his tokens that could be identified were immediately castigated and banished, pegged for allowing the mess to happen in the first place, and his entire work over the least 3 or 4 years destroyed reputation-wise in the space of a few days in January, with the whole drama playing out on the Taco Discord server taco-swap chat channel. Worse, bobocoin_bp0x0 was booted from the server, so he was unable to defend himself.
However, as it turned out, the power of misdirected social chatter let the real culprit get away. Bobocoin_bp0x0 had put his faith in a character named Hatter to help him boost the the Bobocoin tokens great. Following a path that had already been in play over a number of previous WAX token attacks, Hatter found a nice victim in which to continue his LP attacks, pumping up a coin, stacking WAX and then swapping/pulling/sucking out the WAX to leave a useless token behind.
The DeFi nature of the LPs attacked make the whole affair extremely easy and unmonitored for the most part, except for those losing their WAX paired balances overnight.
The Banishment Decision
So, the output of the Bobocoin debacle is that a project owner with at least three years of time invested, as well as money, sees his project completely trashed, and a perp walks away with lots of money he didn't deserve or own. However, the bigger problem is the nature of the banishment. While, again, the perp got away (Hatter), the Taco environment wanted someone punished. Bobocoin_bp0x0 ended up becoming the scapegoat for that anger. All of his coins were essentially flagged, his Liquidity Pool rewards for his LPs on Taco were wiped out, and the resulting panic dumped any worth of his coins (COFFEE, BOPIXBO, etc.).In the meantime, while the Taco community was patting itself on the back with a decision that was arrived at by "vote" of its community after already deciding and stripping Bobocoin_bp0x0 of his LP benefits, Hatter was off and tanking even more LPs. TronTrustCorp Token on WAXP and its farm LP on Alcor, as well as BARK on Taco, would be recent examples not much later.
What does the above all mean? There's a couple of issues at play. First, in the WAX universe DeFi turns out not to be DeFi in practice. It's instead, something dependent on the community it sets up in for the purposes of liquidity and farm establishment. In there defense, it's only fair to include the Taco's team's position on the matter as well.
Does the Decision Matter?
Why even bother with LPs? Awareness, marketing and improving liquidity are the primary reasons. The more people using a given token for a project, the easier it is for more people to get into it. This is obvious any time one wants to swap into the project's token. If the liquidity is poor, a user has to pay extremely high swap fees to get the token. If liquidity is high, swap fees are minimal, usually less than 1 percent. So, LPs really do matter for a project's success. However, if a new small project is under risk of immediate attack by characters like Hatter and then punished for being the next victim when it's clear the project owner was not the culprit, then it defeats any incentive to start new project marketing LPs on that platform, much less the WAX blockchain. Basically, it becomes a political game; if your project is supported and liked by the WAX community, you survive the attack. If, on the other hand, you are an unknown factor like Bobocoin_bp0x0, then your project dies when people lose money on it and you get blamed.
That has nothing to do with DeFi.