Venture-Backed Saddle Finance Proposes Wind-Down, Dissolution

Ethereum-based crypto trading protocol Saddle Finance is moving to shut down operations and distribute its treasury to investors.

Saddle’s founder Sunil Srivatsa on Tuesday proposed the group liquidate its treasury into Arbitrum (ARB) tokens and airdrop the proceeds to holders of Saddle’s SDL and veSDL tokens, with veSDL holders getting four times as big an allocation. It was not immediately clear how large Saddle’s treasury was.

The snap poll comes after the monumental hack of decentralized exchange (DEX) giant Curve last month, which ripped through Ethereum's decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem and, according to Srivatsa’s blog post, reminded Saddle’s team of the ever-present threat of exploitable bugs.

Saddle Finance offers a similar feature set to Curve and previously faced allegations of cloning Curve's codebase. Srivatsa said the protocol’s developers need to step back from the project by September 30, 2023.

Saddle previously raised over $10 million from venture backers. The platform, which is used to exchange between stablecoins and other like-kind assets, currently has around $2 million worth of user deposits according to analytics on its website.

The snapshot for determining who is eligible for allocations has already happened, according to investors watching the situation.

Srivatsa did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

UPDATE (August 8, 20:54 UTC): Adds information throughout.