Secrets of the trader who created the PEPE myth

Let's pay attention to the most popular memecoin of this year, PEPE, around which there are many myths about wealth. For example, some “smart” addresses spent $100 to buy PEPE at the time of its release and did not leave the position, eventually earning many thousands of interest (on-chain data can confirm this).

Ordinary people cannot make money on such projects because the most profitable projects of this kind are usually controlled by traders who can buy at the very beginning and sell at the peak of prices. The initial purpose of creating this type of meme project is to launder dirty money.

NFTethics has recently published several long articles. After careful analysis of on-chain data and various evidence, the true identity of the trader behind PEPE was established. Key points from his tweets:

• In November 2021, funds from the Rug Pull AnubisDAO project were laundered using this year's popular PEPE project, behind which was an anonymous and well-known DeFi investor named Sisyphus.
• His true identity is Kevin Pawlak, the head of OpenSea Ventures, and he now lives a luxurious lifestyle.
• Sisyphus (Kevin Pawlak) is the real leader of the AnubisDAO project. He obtained the private key of the project manager at that time using hacker methods and transferred the funds. He successfully managed to find a scapegoat and avoid punishment.

An OpenSea spokesperson commented on this event: “Kevin Pawlak left his position in June 2023 and had a limited scope of work while working at OpenSea, holding no leadership position. It is unknown if he was involved in the Rug AnubisDAO incident. Additionally, we have no connection or information about the projects as they were carried out before he joined OpenSea."

Laundering funds from the Anubis Rug project using PEPE

In November 2021, a project imitating OlympusDAO, AnubisDAO (ANKH token), raised 13256.4 ETH (at that time ~$57 million) after conducting LBP (liquidity in the bootstrap pool). However, the managers soon discovered that the funds had been transferred to another address. At that time, LBP had been going on for 20 hours and had not yet completed.

On the day of the theft of AnubisDAO funds, Sisyphus was still actively promoting the project on Discord and stated that he had bought $420,000 and would buy even more in the future and claimed that even if development did not go smoothly, eventually In the end, everyone will receive their original contribution back.

The project failed the next day. Sisyphus immediately wrote a long essay explaining his responsibility. He also said that he contacted law enforcement agencies in the United States and Hong Kong, China, and called on the hackers to return the money as soon as possible. Since then I have not mentioned the project again.

Over the past two years, these stolen funds have been continuously transferred to different currency mixers and laundering platforms. One of the wallet addresses (Anubis Rug 3) interacts with FixedFloat, a platform based in the Seychelles.

Initial funds for early PEPE holders also came from the FixedFloat platform, such as Zach Testa (account: DegenHarambe) and Max Zim (account: : SumFattyTuna). Zach Testa bought PEPE just minutes after its release on April 14 and then tweeted about the project. Max Zim retweeted 3 minutes later and also bought PEPE.

Max Zim is a former neighbor of Sisyphus. Before AnubisDAO Rug, their wallets interacted for transfers, and Zim and Testa participated in interviews together.

On April 17, Sisyphus tweeted about turning 0.02 ETH into 63 ETH on a PEPE purchase and posted an address starting with 0x 5 DD . This address received seed capital from the FixFloat platform on April 7th. Also on April 7, another version of the “PEPE” token (aPEPE) was launched with the same contract and the same early holders, for example Zim bought it on April 7.

After transferring 3000 ETH from the "Anubis Rug 3" wallet, the Zim wallet address began actively buying PEPE. Anubis funds were primarily laundered through platforms such as Stake and fund wallet addresses associated with PEPE also transferred large amounts of funds to Stake after the launch of PEPE (April 14) and then to FixFloat. Most of the stolen Anubis funds were transferred between March and July of this year, which almost coincides with PEPE's growth cycle. There is a deep correlation between the two, and the stolen funds may have been laundered through PEPE.

Sisyphus defeats Anubis and creates his own Rug Pull

According to the "NFTethics" investigation, Sisyphus is the brains of the Anubis project, and almost everything required his approval and signature, including the exact wording of every published tweet and every technical or financial question.

None of us really understand LBP (Liquidity Boot Pool), except for Sisyphus.

After the incident, Sisyphus claimed that “DAO members agreed to allow Beerus to deploy LBP because they were either unavailable or They didn’t want to take responsibility.” But there was no evidence within the chat to support this claim.

The morning before the AnubisDAO incident, the team was meeting about the launch of LBP and received an email from the Sisyphus email address containing a PDF of the SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens). A little later, all LBP funds were stolen.

According to subsequent investigations, neither the Copper platform nor the Balancer smart contracts were hacked. In other words, the wallet account of Beerus, the creator of LBP, was either compromised, as he said, or he acted on his own initiative. Sisyphus claimed that he did not send such emails.

When analyzing the emails, no Trojan viruses were found installed, which shifted attention to the hacking of the Beerus computer. He later provided his computer to the Hong Kong police to prove his innocence.

Apart from some team members, no one knew that Beerus had the rights to control LBP.

Why did Beerus receive malware? There's no point in aiming at him. As you know, aureliusBTC and I are the developers closer to the master private key. Outsiders do not know the specific situation in Beerus.

Sisyphus asked Beerus: “Dude, on what did you click?" While Beerus has not yet revealed to the world that he clicked on a malicious PDF email and no one else knew about it.

After draining the LBP fund, Sisyphus accused Beerus of "framing" the project, and also published the attacker's IP address, stating that he came from Hong Kong, where Beerus lived. This IP address actually came from a third party VPS service provider that may rent servers in different regions. Investors later revealed Beerus' true identity - he was the 19-year-old son of Zheng Shunching, a well-known figure in the Hong Kong horse racing industry.

Sisyphus again took up the mouthpiece, and in fact he is Kevin Pawlak, head of OpenSea Ventures

Sisyphus, who claimed to have invested $420 thousand in the Anubis project, was not at all upset after the project was scammed. Having written a short article, he stopped following further events.

On November 6 (a week after the attack), Sisyphus opened another Twitter account under the pseudonym "0x Magallan" (now deleted). This account has been extremely active in the last two years, publishing over 5,000 posts and participating in the marketing of various projects. The account contains two wallet addresses: ferdinand-magellan.eth and ukrainedonations.eth.

In fact, there are many controversial aspects in the activities of Kevin Pawlak. For example, he once purchased an expensive NFT Etherrock 72, split it into PEBBLE tokens using the NFT Fractional fragmentation protocol and sold them at a premium. The PEBBLE token is down over 99% from its ATH. The project was closed in 2023 with all operations completed and the official PEBBLE website pebble.xyz is also under sale.

No one has ever seen the real faces of Sisyphus and 0x Magallan, and there is no relevant information online. However, NFTethics has confirmed his real identity through various on-chain information and multiple sources, as Kevin Pawlak, head of OpenSea Ventures.

First, the timestamps on the pawlak.eth and sisyphus.eth addresses match. On-chain data shows that they all created Zorbs (ZORB) within 1 minute, and they also created sismo.eth DAO (SDAO) within 10 minutes. At the same time, the intervals between other transactions on the blockchain were also very short, and accounts were mostly active with frequent transactions.

Interestingly, Kevin Pawlak often uses the pseudonym Sisyphus to publish critical posts about OpenSea. Perhaps he wants to put pressure on them to get OpenSea to launch a project that he can benefit from, or perhaps he is just complaining.

Many people, including journalist Tim Copeland of The Block, have confirmed that Sisyphus's true identity is indeed Kevin Pawlak, and, in fact, his identity is well known in small circles. He has now renamed the wallet to pawlak.eth. Wallet address: 0xBB5BB336d1Db8471B77F936C210B15fa2A5b3cbb.

Kevin Pawlak is smart, a semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent competition, has a degree in chemical engineering and wants to become a surgeon or a scientific researcher, but people who know him mention his dark side: ruthless, amoral, antisocial and capable lie without regret.

Last October, Kevin Pawlak purchased another property in New York for $3.3 million. More recently, he purchased a Rolls-Royce and a Lamborghini (worth more than $1 million) in France and personally demonstrated his wealth and luxury way of life.