Ardana Labs, a project that aimed to provide an innovative stablecoin platform for the Cardano network, raised $10 million from investors in 2021. However, the project suddenly closed up shop in November 2022, citing “funding and project timeline uncertainty.”

Web3 risk-management platform Xerberus has now suggested that Ardana executives likely transferred 80% of the project’s funds to a personal wallet after first attempting to obscure the transactions by sending some through centralized exchanges. The transfers were allegedly conducted by CEO Ryan Motovu or some other C-level team member. Once the funds were in this wallet, the executives made a series of bad crypto investments, Xerberus alleges. These investments resulted in a loss of approximately $4 million, shortening the runway for the project and ultimately leading to its collapse.

ARDANA’S RISE AND FALL: Ardana was first announced in the summer of 2021, and by October 2021, it had raised $10 million from venture capital firms CFund, Three Arrows Capital (3AC) and Ascensive Assets. However, no Ardana stablecoin platform or bridge was ever launched, and the protocol closed down in November 2022 without a functioning product. The development team stated that the closure was due to “funding and project timeline uncertainty.”

A TRAIL OF QUESTIONABLE MONEY: Xerberus co-founders Simon Peters and Noah Detwiler identified the Ethereum wallet Ardana Labs used to collect funds from the DANA initial coin offering (ICO) in November 2021. According to blockchain data, the first transaction to this account occurred on Sept. 2, 2021, when approximately 0.46 Ether ($1,656 at the time) was sent into it. This was approximately two weeks after the Aug. 15 start date for the first round of Ardana fundraising. Beginning on Sept. 15, the account received multiple USD Coin transfers that eventually added up to millions of dollars worth of stablecoins. Once the funds were raised, they were moved into other wallets through a series of intermediate steps, Xerberus claims.

Xerberus used a variety of techniques to determine with a degree of certainty where the funds went. In some cases, the team was able to identify funds that were sent to Kraken and then immediately sent out to another address. In other cases, Kraken sent the deposited funds to another of its wallets, making it no longer obvious what the user did with the funds. Deposits sent to Coinbase and Gate.io are always sent to other wallets and pooled with other users’ tokens. Ultimately, much of these funds ended up in the Target Wallet, providing what Xerberus sees as solid evidence that the same user made the outgoing transactions.

This News Article was automatically generated by Bob the Bot (AI)

Information	Details
Geography	Global
Countries
Sentiment	negative
Relevance Score	8
People	Motovu, Simon Peters, Ryan Motovu, Detwiler, Peters, Noah Detwiler
Companies	Tokensoft, Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Near Protocol, Ascensive Assets, Coinbase, Kraken, Convex Finance, CFund, FTX, Xerberus, SushiSwap, Gate.io
Currencies	US Dollar, USDC, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tether, Convex Finance
Securities	None