To our beloved VAIOTeers,
After consultation and deliberation with the team in cooperation with the MFSA, Grant Thornton, and our trusted advisors, we have determined that the best option forward in terms of protecting our token holders and mitigating the damage caused by the attack is to re-deploy the $VAI token. We’d like to urge our token holders to not trade the $VAI token at this moment, until further notice.
What We Did:
As the first step for the token re-deployment, we’ve executed a liquidity recovery strategy. The liquidity recovery strategy was highly complex, and each step needed to be exacted in coordination with the CEXes and our developers in order to close the window of opportunity for the hackers to liquidate the remaining ETH and BNB. We stopped trading on both CEXes and DEXes for our legacy $VAI token and used private transactions to liquidate a large number of tokens into the liquidity pool in an attempt to buy as much of the remaining ETH and BNB as possible, hence making the $VAIs held by the hackers worthless. We made the arrangements to freeze all trading on Gate or KuCoin with a permanent blacklisting of attacker wallets to ensure further damage cannot be done, and those wallets will not be able to sell or trade the token. We have coordinated with both Gate and KuCoin to re-list our new token with a simple token swap. All holders on the exchanges will be reimbursed their new $VAI tokens. We will launch our new token on UNISWAP with freshly added liquidity and announce the details in the coming days. We are looking forward to this new journey and new token, with three years of product development under our belts. The new token deployment will be followed by a full reimbursement of user tokens. More info on reimbursements will be shared as part of the UNI re-launch announcement.
Reasons for a Brand NEW $VAI Token:
After careful deliberation, we acknowledge that the risks of maintaining the current token are extremely high due to a number of reasons. First, the fact that the attackers may still hold a large supply of tokens; which means that regardless of liquidity replenishment and/or price appreciation, at any moment the attackers could sell large amounts of tokens at any given time, presenting the risk of an unequal opportunity for the market to have a fair opportunity to enter a position in $VAI.
The other major factor that influenced the decision to redeploy is the loss of control of some of $VAI token pools; the $VAI pre-staking v1 pool, the $VAI/$ETH liquidity pool, and the $VAI/$BNB pool. The attacker held a substantial part of the above-mentioned pools, putting the project at risk of taking out the liquidity from DEXs and hence affecting the VAI token even stronger. We are of the strong belief that the moment we would apply new liquidity, the attackers would utilize that for exit liquidity of the remainder of the tokens, in which case the team would be willingly giving the attackers an opportunity to steal even more company funds. We do not want to give the attackers any further opportunities to steal funds from the project and community.
To understand the implications of this, it is important to understand how we were previously delivering rewards to users. When we deployed our staking and liquidity pools, the VAIOT team had the ability to replenish the rewards and adjust them based on demand and contributions to ensure stakes and liquidity providers were always adequately rewarded. Due to the immutability of blockchain, these stolen pool contracts would always exist, and albeit frozen, which would present significant risk due to the ETH and BNB sitting in those pools, giving the attackers the opportunity to dump the token to $0 which would mean a complete loss of funds and liquidity of the token. That is why the team has decided to recover as much liquidity as possible to recover some of the liquidity that is no longer in project control, preventing the attackers from further draining project and token holder funds.
The deployment of a new token contract means that we will be able to deliver a token free of irregularities due to the attack, and an opportunity to continue to deliver liquidity and staking pools for our dedicated token holders with further security measures put in place to ensure that another attack of this nature is not possible.
Redeployment Plan:
As the community of token holders may have already noticed, the project has attempted and coordinated a liquidation of the token in order to secure the remaining liquidity that the attackers had not claimed yet. We have also contacted both KuCoin and Gate to freeze all trading on our old token. We did this without announcement with the assumption that if we did announce this liquidation ahead of time, the attackers would have simply removed the remaining ETH and BNB from the liquidity pools when they discovered we had no intention of reopening the pools or providing further liquidity to the old token. The funds we recovered will go directly back into liquidity replenishment for the new token and any associated costs for bringing the new $VAI token back to the position it was in before the attack, including reimbursements for the token holders.
We will now perform a token re-deployment and re-launch on DEXs and CEXs with proper liquidity provision following this week. The token re-deployment will be completed on Polygon, and we will be launching the token on Uniswap, with liquidity provision happening directly on UNISWAP itself. We will still redeploy our liquidity pools and staking pools on ETH with increased rewards, in wait for a staking service on our proprietary VAIOT blockchain built on COSMOS while making CEX staking available on KuCoin as we were doing before for users who do not operate on DEXes and want to avoid additional fees. CEX re-deployment will appear as a 1:1 swap, so users do not have to perform any actions to get their new tokens, they will simply appear on their accounts.
For clarity, the new $VAI token will be available on:
- Uniswap
- KuCoin
- Gate.io
- Kwikswap (Deployment date TBD)
Token contract will be officially shared once the redeployment plan is completed and the recovery plan commences. Any trades made on the old $VAI token moving forward will not be compensated or acknowledged, so trade at your own risk.
Recovery Plan:
Utilizing the recovered funds plus contingency budget reserved by the VAIOT team, we will be able to replenish the liquidity to the point it was at before the attack. Although we are certain our new security protocols make it impossible for attackers to take control of the contract in the way they did before, we will be directly applying liquidity to UNISWAP and Kwikswap where the liquidity pools are secured directly by the DEXes. Our LP staking pool and pre-staking pool will be renewed in the coming days as well with higher rewards.
DEX snapshots have been taken for users who held tokens before the attack and users who held tokens prior to the freezing of the old token. Snapshots were also taken on both CEXes to ensure every single user has their funds returned to them. Any holders at these moments will be reimbursed fully. To ensure our users still have a low-fee option for trading the token, we have made the decision to deliver pairs on the Ethereum and Polygon networks and will be removing the BSC network permanently. This is due to a severe lack of liquidity and movement on the BSC side, an imbalance in rewards that was unfair to holders of $VAI on ETH, and confusion regarding available pools on the BSC side. We also feel that this is the best option to maintain high liquidity on our highest volume platforms as we approach mainnet on our VAIOT blockchain.
Following the redeployment of the new VAI Token, all $VAI tokens will be redistributed to the holders based on snapshots. The details on the distribution of new VAI Tokens will be shared as part of the token relaunch announcement. The token will also be available to deposit on KuCoin and Gate. Holders that held $VAI on either KuCoin or Gate will have their tokens replenished on their respective CEXes.
We understand that this is the longer and more complex route on our road to recovery, but we believe that in the short, medium, and long-term benefits of this plan far out-weight any other options. We would like to formally thank every single token holder, community member, and supporters of VAIOT for their continued support and trust in our team, vision, and project.
Thank you for your understanding, and we are looking towards realizing the full potential of our project.
⁃ The VAIOT Team
