Meet Blue Kirby, the guy that pumped YFI and walked away
- Who is Blue Kirby and how he is involved in yearn.finance.
- The anonymity is not always good for the DeFi industry as it makes it vulnerable to scams.
Once upon a time, there lived a guy. One day he learned about DeFi and decided to get a piece of the pie. In 2020 he jumped another bandwagon that was going full steam ahead. He started promoting a nascent DeFi project Yearn.finance (YFI) and become one of the most prominent shillers of the platform and its coin, hiding behind Blue Kirby nickname on Twitter.
Blue Kirby's role in Yearn .finance's rise and fall
The anonymous fan started a blog where he posted regular updates about YF price and discussed the protocol's features. He is also known as an author of the "1 YFI = 1 BTC" meme and a promoter of a Yearning man, a community event in Tokyo for YFI holders. They even registered yearningman.party domain, which is now dysfunctional.
Blue Kirby's Twitter account gained popularity quickly with some renowned industry names such as Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, Andrew Kang of Mechanism Capital, Su Zhu of Three Arrows Capital, following him. Now his account (@bluekirbyfi) is also dysfunctional.
Blue Kirby announced that he was stepping away from the project.
It's for the best. Too much was being tied to me. The people building YFI are incredible, the vision is sound, and when AC tweets stablecredit, it will rip like crazy. I want to be human and do human things like Tokyo. Some of you are actually really f'ing cool.
Apart from that, he started emptying his public ENS so that no one can track his transactions, allegedly to protect privacy, following the threats related to the Eminence debacle.
No wonder, as Blue Kirby's account actively promoted EMN and even instructed how to use its smart contracts. Now Eminence (EMN) investors want to hold him, and Andre Cronje and Banteg accountable for the protocol's $15 million hacks.
The project was neither launched nor audited officially. However, investors jumped into it in hopes of being among early adopters of the platform created by yearn.finance founder.
It's easy to be cool on the Internet
DeFi is the hottest thing in the cryptocurrency industry. However, the place is inhabited by anonymous guys hiding behind nicknames. Consider it the flipside of privacy as it is as easy disappearing into thin air as clicking a couple of buttons on a keyboard.
Blue Kirby's identity was allegedly tied to a person named Benjamin Hebert, a funder of supplements company Natural Stacks specialized in brain health.
why am I not surprised that @bluekirby was selling adderall like supplements online before venturing into cryptohttps://t.co/EFXa4aweqN
— litocoen (@litocoen) October 11, 2020
However, in most cases, the founders of Pinzi-like DeFi projects can exit scam without risk of being exposed.
- In September, YFDEX.Finance (YFDEX) exit-scammed users by running away with $20 million worth of investors' funds two days after launch.
- A liquidity mining DeFi project on EOS called Emerald Mine (EMD)moved users' locked-up assets worth $2.5 million to an account labeled "sji111111111".
- The founders of a DeFi project, LV Finance, also falsified audit results and stole investors money from an ecosystem that was supposed to be a "community-driven."
These are the most recent examples of DeFi scams that lect their participants holding the bag, as their anonymous creators walked away, abandoning their Twitter nicks and Telegram channels.
Read our in-depth story on the centralized nature of DeFi that makes it all the easier to steal the money from the unsuspecting yield hunters.
Author
Tanya Abrosimova
Independent Analyst
