What Is “Vampire Attack” in the Context of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Governance?

A vampire attack is a strategy where a new protocol launches a copy of an existing, successful protocol and incentivizes users to migrate their liquidity and usage by offering superior token rewards. This can drain liquidity and users from the original protocol, effectively "sucking the blood" out of it.

The governance tokens of the new protocol are often used to coordinate the attack and subsequent development.