BSC "Arbitrage" Project Arbix Finance Vanishes With $10 Million

Another Binance Smart Chain project has disappeared with user funds — an increasingly familiar pattern on that chain — though this case stands out for its size: roughly $10 million taken, without any particularly advanced attack technique involved.

Arbix Finance marketed itself as an arbitrage-focused BSC protocol, inviting users to deposit into single-asset vaults in pursuit of "optimal yield with low risk." Depositors ended up with the opposite outcome.

At around 3 AM UTC on January 4th, the team emptied the vaults and simultaneously took down its website, Twitter, and Telegram accounts. Approximately $10 million in deposited assets moved directly from the vaults into a single wallet, starting with a transfer of roughly $1 million in BTCB.

Further withdrawals included $920,000 in Binance-pegged ETH, $2.25 million in BSC-USD, $1.7 million in BUSD, $1.4 million in CAKE, and $1 million in BSC-USDC, along with smaller balances of ADA, DOT, DOGE, LINK, XRP, and WBNB.

A second piece of the exit scam involved the project's own token. On December 10th, roughly a month before the vaults were drained, a separate address had minted 4.5 million ARBX. Once the vault-draining began, that supply was sold off through PancakeSwap, collapsing ARBX's price from $1.42 to effectively zero. The roughly $50,000 raised from that sale was then routed into the wallet holding the rest of the stolen funds.

From there, the BSC-based wallet moved the assets to the same address on Ethereum, where they were converted into roughly 2,500 ETH — worth about $9.9 million at the time — before being forwarded on to 0xdc85c1eb22b0ece7be559a83fd788fe57f5a7a9f.

Certik had audited Arbix the previous November and marked all major and critical findings as resolved. After the exit scam, the firm published a brief incident thread, which mainly drew the frustration of users who had trusted Certik's earlier sign-off.

Total losses from scams, hacks, and rug pulls across the industry in 2021 were tallied at $2.1 billion. Whether 2022 would surpass that figure remained an open question, put to a vote in the outlet's Telegram group.