Як Паулі перетворив Pond0x на найскладнішу пастку у крипто світі ( і заробив на цьому 450 ETH)

The Setup: When Gas Fees Hit 400 Gwei

It started with chaos. Early morning July 29, 2023 - Ethereum’s gas fees spiked to 360 gwei, then kept climbing. Network congestion was off the charts. Something was happening, but nobody outside a few crypto Twitter circles knew what.

Then a screenshot started circulating. A guy named 0xSun had posted in a WeChat group: “Honestly I have no idea what’s going on. I threw in 1 ETH on this website and somehow kept selling 44.5 ETH. I just kept going.”

44.5x return on a memecoin in hours? That’s when people started digging.

The Bait: A Website That Wasn’t Really a Swap

The URL led to Pond0x, a project launched by Pauly - yeah, that Pauly. The guy who became famous (infamous?) for basically weaponizing anti-BAYC sentiment into a whole brand.

Pauly tweeted the contract address and website at 12:29 AM:

Welcome To Pond0x • $PNDX Contract: 0x1d4214081985ad20aa3ca93a2206ae792635cbec

Memecoin degens immediately flooded in. But here’s where it gets spicy: the website wasn’t actually a swap. It was disguised as one, but underneath? Pure liquidity farming mechanics.

When you thought you were buying PNDX on the site, you were actually injecting ETH as liquidity into a PEPE LP farm. You’d get a PID (pool ID) and a multiplier that determined your share. The on-chain data showed “Mine Liquidity,” not “Transfer” - if you knew where to look.

The Trap: Game Theory at Its Finest

Let’s break down what Pauly actually did here:

Phase 1 - The Insiders Win: Early players like 0xSun who understood the mechanics got PNDX at crazy-low prices through the website. They were printing money.

Phase 2 - The Website Dies: As traffic exploded, the site went down from congestion. Latecomers couldn’t access it. They had one option: jump straight to Uniswap and buy directly from the contract address.

Phase 3 - The Slaughter: Those late buyers were just buying into a sea of selling pressure from Phase 1 winners. FOMO got crushed by supply.

Pauly literally understood that most people follow contract addresses through Twitter instead of checking the actual website. He knew the website would choke under traffic. He engineered the sacrifice. Early smart players made money. Late FOMO buyers became exit liquidity.

One analyst nailed it: “The essence of an excellent project isn’t making everyone money - it’s making your core users money.” Pauly gets it.

The Plot Twist: Code Vulnerability Goes Nuclear

But the story doesn’t end there. At 12:57 AM, @YazanXBT posted that PNDX tokens were vanishing from wallets. Lots of users reported the same - their bags were being drained.

Security researchers found the problem: the contract code had a critical vulnerability in its transfer function. Attackers could manipulate gas calculations to transfer anyone’s tokens. It was essentially an open door.

What followed was pure chaos. Users started exploiting the bug to steal from each other. Gas fees hit 400+ gwei. It was a full meltdown.

Meanwhile, Pauly’s addresses (realpond0xdev.eth & 0x36…40BC) had already taken their profit and logged off. On-chain data shows they extracted 450+ ETH from the entire affair.

Who Is Pauly Actually?

This guy isn’t new to stirring the pot. Here’s his history:

The BAYC Wars: When Bored Ape Yacht Club got caught up in the Nazi imagery controversy (legitimate criticism from researcher Ryder Ripps about ape symbolism/Simianization), Pauly sided with Ryder. They created RR/BAYC - a mirror series dedicated to roasting BAYC. It actually topped OpenSea’s volume charts. Yuga Labs sued them for copyright.

Not Larva Labs: Pauly founded this as a direct middle finger to CryptoPunks and Larva Labs. When CryptoPunks refused to grant CC0 licenses and restricted commercial use to holders making <$100K annually, Pauly released CryptoPhunks - almost identical images but flipped. The licensing message: “It’s time for NFT to actually be decentralized.”

yougetnothing.eth: In May, Pauly created an ENS address and asked the community to send ETH with zero promise of returns. People sent 600 ETH anyway. It was social commentary disguised as a test - probing whether people would donate to anything if they thought airdrop rewards might come.

The Real Question

Is Pond0x a scam? Is it art? Is it a social experiment?

Probably all three.

Pauly clearly doesn’t care about traditional rules. He designs systems that reward people who read the fine print and punish people who FOMO blindly. He’s running permanent experiments on crypto incentive structures and human behavior.

But here’s the thing: even if you think Pauly’s a genius for engineering this, he still bears responsibility for shipping code with known vulnerabilities. And regular users who got rekt? Yeah, doing research before gambling is “self-cultivation” - but it’s also unrealistic to expect everyone to reverse-engineer smart contracts before buying.

The Pond0x incident is basically crypto in a nutshell: rules aren’t what they seem, early movers print money, late comers get liquidated, and everyone’s learning game theory the hard way.