The cryptocurrency market is attracting the eyeballs of investors and traders who continue to pump in more money despite the increasing number of scams and frauds. In the latest incident, hackers have stolen cryptocurrency worth a whopping $180 million from Beanstalk Farms, a Decentralised Finance (De-Fi) project.
Beanstalk is a platform that rewards participants for contributing money to a central fund pool used to balance ONE token‘s value at $1.
“Beanstalk suffered an exploit. The Beanstalk Farms team is investigating the attack and will announce to the community as soon as possible,” the company admitted in a tweet.
Hackers gained access to the platform by exploiting Beanstalk’s majority vote governance system. It is a key feature used in many DeFi protocols.
PeckShield, a blockchain analytics company, first detected the attack.
Beanstalk attacker “used the flash loan obtained through decentralised protocol Aave and borrowed close to $1 billion in cryptocurrency assets. These were exchanged for enough beans to earn a 67 percent voting stake in this project.”
According to the report, the attacker immediately repaid the flash loans, making a profit of $80 million.
It was not the first of its type incident where hackers conveniently used DeFi platform to steal cryptocurrencies worth millions of dollars. Hackers stole $120 million worth of crypto tokens from the Blockchain-based Decentralised Finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO in January 2018. Ironically, hackers depleted several crypto wallets before the platform could stop cyberattacks,
Cybercriminals also stole $80 million worth of cryptocurrency from Qubit Finance in December 2017. Qubit Finance is also a Decentralised Finance (DeFi) platform.
This week, the US blamed North Korean hackers group Lazarus for stealing $625 Million worth of cryptocurrency from Ronin Network, owned by Sky Mavis, a US-based developer group.
The increasing number of such incidents has created concerns regarding the security measures of DeFi platforms.
