I don't understand why people are so obsessed with the 12% APR. If they had the money to run the most profitable signature campaign, leave $40k as collateral, charged absolutely zero for mixing, and carried a shitload amount of money to begin with as we saw, then it doesn't preclude the possibility that they wanted to attract users via APR.
Maybe because it was eerily similar to Celsius' APR rates:
https://bitcompare.net/platforms/celsius-network .
10+% APR is very unstable and that means you are doing some high-risk, liquidity-wise, financial activity to sustain that rate. It obviously must be paid from profit because if you just take that money off of reserves, eventually there will be no more money to do this.
That set off alarm bells inside me that gave me the suspicion that this program would not be profitable (and I did tell them that), but I never thought they would pull an exit scam like this, especially after they were discussing on the forum about how to best implement privacy for their service, avatar design contest etc.