Key Takeaways:
- Solana DeFi protocol has suffered an exploit
- The attack on its pricing oracles has left the platform with $1.26 million in bad debt.
- Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko called the incident a "market manipulation".
YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) — Solend, the Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has suffered an exploit. The latest attack on its pricing oracles has left the platform with $1.26 million in bad debt.
The company announced the news of the exploit on Wednesday.
“An oracle attack on USDH affecting the Stable, Coin98, and Kamino isolated pools was detected…. Affected pools have been disabled and exchanges have been notified of the exploiter’s address,”
Solend wrote on Twitter.
Aside from the three lending pools mentioned, all others remained unaffected, according to the platform’s clarification.
Blockchain security firm Peckshield also confirmed the attack on the DeFi protocol through a separate Tweet.
Oracles bridge the off-chain world with the on-chain world by transferring real-time data onto the blockchain. Hence, a price oracle is responsible for streaming price data on the blockchain.
Meanwhile, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko denied that there was an exploit. Although the official Twitter post by the company confirmed the oracle attack, he described the incident as market manipulation.
“It was a market manipulation attack besides the oracle relied on a single low liquidity pool,”
he wrote.
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DeFi finance hacks are rampant
Attacks on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms are notorious. As a result, hackers have been on an exploit spree. In 2021, hackers stole about $14 billion from the crypto industry, with the DeFi sector mostly hit.
The attacks have not stopped since. As CoinChapter earlier reported, Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network lost $625 million to hackers in March this year. In August, Nomad Bridge suffered another large DeFi hack. Again, hackers exploited the platform for around $190 million in just a few hours.
Days later, another DeFi protocol CurveFinance suffered a $570,000-hack.
According to Security firm Chainalysis, hackers stole around $718 million in the first two weeks of October 2022. One of the instances was the massive exploitation of Mango Markets. In addition, the Solana DeFi protocol lost over $115 million in a series of exploits.
Meanwhile, the Solend team has not yet released a post-mortem report of the attack.
Read our extensive report here on protecting your tokens from crypto hackers.
