What is a vampire attack?
A typical vampire attack consists of three components:
- Find a leading project.
- Create an analogue using a business model, architecture or original code.
- Make excessive economic incentives the main difference from the popular competitor.
The result of this strategy should be “sucking” by a new project of users and their capital from the attack object-of any popular protocol.
A vampire attack strategy arose https://gagarin.news/news/primitives-transforms-digital-wallet-into-a-social-network/ in the field of decentralized finance (Defi). The source code of Defi applications or its main part are usually open. Thus, a similar application is quite easy to copy and start, making only minor changes.
In addition, copies developers can easily release their own control tokens and with the help of it to overestimate the profitability of liquidity pharmination, which is a standard way to make money for users.
How Uniswap has become a victim of a vampire attack?
In 2020, in the field of Defi, the decentralized exchange of Uniswap began to quickly gain popularity. By the beginning of September 2020, the daily trading volume in the protocol reached $ 1.8 billion, which was comparable to leading centralized sites for cryptocurrency trade.
A project called Sushiswap appeared against this background. Its anonymous creators did not hide that the new protocol is fork Uniswap. However, Sushiswap had an important difference – Sushi’s own token, which its users received as a reward for pharmacing in pools.
How the vampire attack on Opensea took place in 2022?
Another victim of “vampires” was the Opensea NFT market, on which the main amount of trading is made by non-replaced tokens.
It is noteworthy that in 2021, Marketplais was already subjected to a vampire attack from the Infinity platform.