Ribbon Finance issues a massive airdrop, causing controversy as investor Divergence profits 702 ETH

Author: Hu Tao
On October 7, with the implementation of the latest governance proposal from the DeFi structured project Ribbon Finance, its governance token RBN officially lifted the token transfer restrictions and opened the Uniswap liquidity pool, with prices peaking above $4.6 and maintaining that level for a considerable time, thus creating one of the most generous airdrop cases in DeFi history.
Previously, at the end of May, Ribbon Finance announced an airdrop to interactive users and multiple DeFi options project option sellers and LPs, with the amount of airdropped tokens increasing with higher interaction amounts. The airdrop accounted for 3% of the total issuance, or 30 million RBN, with 1,620 eligible addresses, allowing each address to claim an average of 18,528 RBN, valued at over $85,000 at the peak price, and currently still worth over $62,000.
According to official information, Ribbon Finance is a protocol that provides cryptocurrency structured products for DeFi, with investors including Dragonfly Capital, Nascent, Coinbase Ventures, Scalar Capital, and others. Users can deposit assets such as USDC and ETH into the protocol, which then uses the users' assets to run long/short strategies on options protocols like Opyn and Hegic to earn stable returns. Currently, the TVL has reached $130 million, and the diluted market cap has reached $3.2 billion.
Taking the T-USDC-P-ETH product as an example, this product primarily earns returns on its USDC deposits by running a weekly automated ETH shorting strategy, where the put options are collateralized by USDC. The treasury reinvests the earnings back into the strategy, effectively increasing the depositors' returns over time, with the current annualized yield on USDC reaching 30%.
However, during the airdrop process of this project, the airdrop operation by Divergence Venture analyst Bridget Waters raised considerable doubts from the public.
Based on information and data from multiple sources, including Twitter user @Gabagool, an address starting with "0x28666" received 36 ETH transfers from addresses that received the RBN airdrop around 11 PM Beijing time on the 8th. These addresses sold all their RBN for ETH on the same day, and the "0x28666" address cumulatively received at least 702 ETH, amounting to a profit of $2.51 million.

At the same time, this address registered the ENS address "bridgeth.eth" a month ago, which is believed to be owned by the Twitter account Bridget (@_bridgeharris), whose owner is Divergence Venture analyst Bridget Waters. This suggests that Divergence Venture likely exploited insider information to gain improper benefits from the airdrop.
After attracting public scrutiny, Divergence Venture stated on Twitter that they had no insider information and were merely speculating that there would be an airdrop. Although they did not explain the precise operations, they admitted to attempting to distort the results of the airdrop to benefit themselves, stating, "We realized that during the RBN airdrop, we crossed a line."
Ribbon Finance co-founder Julian Koh also stated on Twitter that he did not provide Divergence with any information about how the RBN airdrop worked.
Currently, the address starting with "0x28666" has returned all 702 ETH in profits back to Ribbon Finance's multi-signature address.
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