Ribbon Finance airdrop event follow-up: Divergence will donate all seed round share tokens
Ribbon Finance also plans to reward 20,000 RBN to Twitter users who were the first to expose the incident.Author: Gu Yu
On October 9, the incident where the crypto venture capital firm Divergence Ventures profited millions of dollars through the Ribbon Finance airdrop mechanism attracted significant attention in the crypto industry. After Divergence Ventures returned all the profit ETH, today, Ribbon Finance co-founder Julian Koh wrote further in response to the event.
According to the timeline of events released by Julian Koh, the project had sent an email to investment institutions on May 18, which included information about the issuance and airdrop, and officially took a snapshot of eligible addresses on May 22. However, according to previously disclosed information about the Divergence Ventures analyst's address, all interactions by this analyst occurred before May 18, with some interactions happening in April. Therefore, Julian Koh believes that Divergence Ventures did not profit from insider information.
Considering the potential negative impact on the market, Julian Koh stated that Divergence Ventures has decided to donate all seed round allocation shares (approximately 1.35 million RBN, equivalent to $5.4 million) to organizations that can help improve the industry (diversity, regulation, etc.), which will be determined in the coming days. Meanwhile, this portion of RBN allocation will be held in the DAO and will be directly attributed to the corresponding organizations. This allocation will follow a 3-year vesting schedule, which will remain unchanged.
To alleviate further investor concerns about deposits based on insider information, Ribbon Finance compiled a list of 137 addresses that made deposits after the email was sent to investors and sent an internal email to investment institutions requesting the return of all RBN airdrops they received to the Ribbon DAO treasury. "While it is difficult/impossible to prove ownership, we believe on-chain analysis ninjas will figure out if there are more malicious airdrops."
Julian Koh also stated that the project will create a governance proposal to reward @Gabagool with 20,000 RBN bounty, worth over $80,000, for identifying the Divergence Ventures analyst's airdrop trading and exposing it.
At the same time, Ribbon Finance will propose a plan in a few days to decide how to handle the 719 ETH returned by the Divergence Ventures analyst.
"Overall, this is an unfortunate situation for all parties involved—it's a learning lesson in ethical and responsible disclosure for other projects and investors," Julian Koh said. "This industry is still in its infancy, and we are learning how to navigate situations like this. We hope future projects can benefit from what we learned from this failure. We will resolve this issue soon and hope to regain the community's trust and confidence in the project."
