Atom validator Sunflower was taken to task by members of the Cosmos community due to a commission change and subsequent bot reward claiming behavior over a 24 hour period.
On July 5, Airdrops One and Cosmos Ecosystem Validator Golden Ratio Staking took to Twitter to alert the community of potentially unethical behavior by Sunflower, due to a extraordinary commission change from .01% to 99.35% and rapidly claiming commission rewards. At the end of the 24 hour long incident, Sunflower changed their commission to 0.49%. While the commission was set just shy of 100%, delegators received next to nothing in staking rewards.
That sunflower is about to pull the greatest long range, totally legal, rug in history.
Rack up the delegations at 0%, wait months for it to get sticky and people to forget, then max 100% commission and profit $4k per day.
— Golden Ratio Staking | Validator (@GoldenStaking) July 6, 2023
On the validator page at mintscan.io, Sunflower’s details have been changed to say:
“Sorry for the commission’s accidental change, but ‘commission cannot be changed more than once in 24h’ 😭.”
The commission change was followed by what appears to be scripted behavior with Sunflower collecting commission rewards every minute. All told, Sunflower was able to collect close to $3,000 in the span of 24 hours.
Cosmos news tried reaching out for comment from Sunflower, but was unable to. If you have any information on how to reach Sunflower, please contact us.
Sunflower now claims this was an accident.
Really?
➡️Rewards Wallet mod after the comms change
➡️Comms collected _every minute_ (likely via script)
➡️Rewards Wallet updated again
➡️No outreach on twitter or reddit
➡️Collected $3k USD in the meantimehttps://t.co/3Irj1hI1iH— Airdrops (@Airdrops_one) July 6, 2023
Airdrops One points out “this can happen again” and urges delegators to check for red flags:
- 0% commission
- Max possible commission set at 100%
- No social or web presence
It’s important to point out that while this activity by Sunflower is not illegal, it could be construed as unethical and the community has offered suggestions on how to deal with such situations for the future. Suggestions ranged from “kicking them out of the validator set” to putting a warning on Mintscan to let delegators know if a validator has commission change set to 100%.
It remains to be seen how Sunflower responds to the ethics charges and how the discussion around events like this unfolds.
