In this report, we will demonstrate how the Ardana Team, led by Ryan Matovu, raised at least 9.07 million USD in Stable Coins on Ethereum to build the Ardana Exchange on Cardano. We will provide evidence that the Ardana Administrator utilized a cluster of wallets on Ethereum to use these funds to purchase speculative assets worth millions. In total disregard for the principles of risk management, the team was significantly impacted by the price collapse during the subsequent bear market, losing up to 4 million USD on decentralized exchanges and staking protocols. Given the risk-loving behavior of the administrator, it is reasonable to assume that the losses on decentralized exchanges were mirrored by those on centralized exchanges. However, we cannot confirm this conclusively as we do not have access to centralized order books.
The substantial losses incurred by Ardana Team’s trading activity coincide with their attempts to exploit the Cardano ecosystem. Up to 6 million USD worth of capital was exracted via the Ardana Token from the Cardano ecosystem. We will highlight that the bulk of this extraction was carried out directly by treasury wallets and potential founder wallets.
Not only did Ardana exploit the Cardano ecosystem on a multi-million-dollar scale, but they also never ceased these activities. The Ardana wallet administrator continued to drain Ardana Liquidity Pools as recently as this summer (2023).
Lastly, we will reveal that not all the funds are depleted. We’ve identified at least one wallet within the Ethereum cluster that, until very recently, contained 1.4 million USD. We believe there might be more wallets holding the ill-gotten gains from these operations.
In conclusion, we are presented with a team that disregarded all forms of risk management, exchanged stable assets for highly volatile ones during potentially significant price drops. When this high-risk, possibly greed-driven strategy failed, the administrator chose to siphon money from another ecosystem to continue making risky bets, neglecting their inherent responsibility towards their community and investors.
Lastly, we revisit the Ardana Case under the lease of our risk scores. The warnings signed of Ardana were entirely public, as all evidence presented in this report is within the public domain. The data was available at any moment in time but framework and tools were lacking to extract the critical information in due time. This is the very pur- pose of the Xerberus Risk Rating Protocol. Our tools would have issued a warning as early as September 2, 2021, with five additional unique alerts preceding the official announcement. Users might have been shielded from potential losses if Xerberus had been fully operational and actively alerting during these warning instances.
Read the Full Report here: https://docsend.com/view/anpnvfkufguryx2c