Gemholic was accused of pulling 3.4 million USD right after zkSync unlocked the fund

Gemholic, the team behind the decentralized exchange GemSwap on the Ethereum Layer 2 network ZkSync, is currently facing rug pulling accusations after shifting investor funds to Ethereum and seemingly removing all communication channels your society.

In April 2023, Eden Au, director of research at The Block, first discovered that 921 ETH raised by Gemholic were locked due to technical differences between ZkSync's Era network and Ethereum's mainnet.

ZkSync developers later announced they had found a solution to unlock these funds, which were worth approximately $1.7 million at the time, but later increased to $3.4 million due to the increase in ETH price. These funds are unlocked once the v24 upgrade of ZkSync is deployed on mainnet.

Gemholic initially promised to continue the project once the funds were unlocked:

“We understand that many people have lost faith, but we still believe that the @zksync team can do the right thing. We need people to trust us. As soon as the contract is fixed, we will launch a marketing campaign and a launch event for the project. We will also refund the excess amount,” the project wrote on its X account.

However, after the funds were restored, user

“Today, $3.5 million was stolen by Gemholic, who for a year promised to refund its investors, only to pull a rug pull after the funds were finally unlocked,” user X NSerec, founder of zkMarkets, writes on X.

Gemholic has undergone consumer verification (KYC) and smart contract verification from blockchain security provider SolidProof, and received a certificate of compliance. SolidProof and ZkSync have not commented on this incident.