Can turning 0.5 Ethereum into 75 just by clicking really lead to overnight wealth?

An anonymous individual who purchased SYFI at a cost of $200 confirmed on Twitter that they "luckily" exploited a vulnerability in Soft Yearn Finance (SYFI) and sold the tokens after the algorithm executed reBase, making a profit of approximately $250,000.

Soft Yearn Finance

Since the decentralized stablecoin Ampleforth popularized the concept of "elastic supply adjustment (reBase)," many projects based on this token economic model have emerged in the market, such as the once-popular Yam Finance, Based, and Zombie Finance developed by Taiwanese developers. These projects automatically increase/burn tokens at regular intervals to adjust the token market price closer to the target price through algorithms.

Among them, the token SYFI issued by Soft Yearn Finance is also designed as a low-volatility cryptocurrency based on elastic supply adjustment, with the token targeting 0.0003 YFI. The project initially did not receive much attention in the market, but it has recently become the focus of market attention.

From the above image, we can see that SYFI experienced a massive drop on September 4th, with the token price plummeting from $99 to $0.00259 in an instant, a decrease of over 99%. Was it a whale dumping? Or did the team exit? No one could have expected that the reason for this situation was actually due to a retail investor with a cost basis of only $200.

$200 Turned into $250,000

Two days ago (7th), an anonymous individual claiming to be Amplify revealed on Twitter how they made $250,000 in profit from Soft Yearn Finance with a cost basis of $200.

https://twitter.com/A_mplify/status/1302852245059330048

As mentioned above, SYFI is a low-volatility cryptocurrency issued based on an elastic supply adjustment mechanism that automatically adjusts its supply according to an algorithm.

However, the issue arose because Soft Yearn Finance had a flaw that caused the price on Uniswap not to adjust during the reBase of SYFI. For example, if I originally had 1 token worth $100, after reBase, it should have become 100 tokens worth $1. However, due to Uniswap's price not adjusting accordingly, I ended up with 100 tokens worth $100 after reBase.

This anonymous individual was not sure if Soft Yearn Finance indeed had a flaw; they simply took a gamble when their 2 SYFI tokens turned into 15,551 tokens, decisively selling all their tokens on Uniswap, luckily exploiting the Soft Yearn Finance flaw.

17/ My second thought is: "Ok. You have 9 seconds left. This goes one of two ways. The transaction succeeds, or it fails. There literally is not a third option if I press this button right now. The most I can lose is $20-$50 of fees."

— 0xAmplify.eth 🦇🔊 (@0xAmplify) September 7, 2020

This trade nearly drained all the liquidity from the pool. The individual later stated that they acquired 740 ETH at a cost of 0.5 ETH, which is approximately $200, and ultimately made a profit of around $250,000.

Looking at the data from Uniswap's platform, it is evident that SYFI's liquidity and trading volume have completely disappeared, signaling the near demise of Soft Yearn Finance. Although the team claims to be developing SYFI v2 and fixing the previous flaws, the project has lost its reputation after this incident, making a comeback challenging.