$15.6 Million Worth Of Crypto Stolen

Market Meditations | April 4, 2022

You may recall that just last Tuesday the Ronin network announced a loss of more than $125 million last Tuesday. Two days later, Ola Finance said they were exploited for $3.6 million. And less than 2 days later, the Ethereum-based lending protocol Inverse Finance said that they were exploited for $15.6 million.

How did it happen this time?

  • According to Inverse, the attacker artificially manipulated token prices to borrow loans against extremely low collateral.
  • The attacker used roughly 901 ETH (about $3 million) from Tornado Cash in order to pull off the attack and be able to raise the price of the tokens.
  • The attacker tricked the price oracle used to track token prices into thinking the price of Inverse’s tokens was much higher.
  • The attacker walked away with 1,588 ETH, 94 WBTC, 39 YFI, and 3,99,669 DOLA. They have also cycled the funds through Tornado Cash making it hard to know where the funds will end up.
  • Inverse is temporarily pausing all borrowing on Anchor while they work on a new INV oracle (used to track price).

There are many DeFi protocols that have been getting exploited but this was a different tactic than we have seen. Inverse announced plans to propose a DAO to “ensure all wallets impacted by the price manipulation are repaid 100%.” Remember that we should always take this kind of risk into account when making an investment.