Another day, another flash loan attack on a defi protocol.
A Binance Smart Chain [BSC] decentralized finance [defi] yield optimizer project called PancakeBunny, has supposedly suffered an “economic exploit”. According to the PancakeBunny team’s official post on Twitter, the protocol was subjected to a flash loan attack from an external actor.
However, the platform clarified that none of the vaults on the platform were compromised.
“We would like to remind the community that no vaults have been compromised. The exploit was an economic exploit that attacked the price of BUNNY, using flash loans. We repeat, no vaults have been breached.”
The malicious entity reportedly borrowed “a huge amount” of Binance Coin [BNB] on DEX Pancakeswap and went on to manipulate the price of USDT/BNB as well as BUNNY/BNB. Subsequently, the hacker dumped all of the acquired BUNNY in the market which led to the crash in the token’s price.
PancakeBunny rebuffed reports that claimed that the attacker siphoned off with $1 billion worth of tokens but has not revealed the actual figures yet. According to calculations, the exploit drained over $200 million from the yield platform’s smart contracts. However, the blockchain security firm Certik said that the losses were around $40 million. Its tweet regarding the same read,
“An alert was published at Certik over an incident on PancakeBunny, which suffered from a FlashLoan attack and resulted in a loss of ~$40M (114K WBNB & 697K BUNNY). An illustration of exploited asset movements is presented & we are actively monitoring further TXs.”
Further making the situation worse, the hacker left a rabbit-related pun as a note after the execution of the transaction that read “Aren’t Flashloans Earitating”
Notably, the BSC-based defi project is led by Mound, a startup that secured $1.6 million from the exchange’s venture capital and incubator arm, Binance Labs recently.
DeFi Token, BUNNY Free Falls
The native token, BUNNY was trading above $230 before the incident. However, it slashed its gains by more than 80% over the past 24-hours and was currently trading at $31.48, according to CoinGecko.