Summary:
- Ankr’s team will take a snapshot and reimburse affected users, a thread from the protocol explained following the hack.
- An exploiter drained around $5 million of Binance’s BNB from the DeFi platform during the early hours of Friday.
- Changpeng Zhao said his exchange froze around $3 million of the stolen funds.
Ankr protocol shared plans to reimburse users affected by the $5 million exploit of the platform’s BNB liquidity pool on Friday. The team tweeted hours later that they “will take a snapshot and reissue ankrBNB to all valid aBNBc holders before the exploit.” aBNBc and aBNBb “will not longer be redeemable” while ankrBNB will remain redeemable for users, the project tweeted.
The project will also buy $5 million worth of BNB to compensate affected liquidity providers, Friday’s thread revealed.
Friday’s exploit joined a myriad of hacks on DeFi protocols this year. Analysts said DeFi stole over $1 billion from decentralized platforms as of August 2022. October was tagged the worst month for crypto hacks to date.
Ankr exploits in a nutshell
The DeFi protocol offers cross-chain staking since launching in March 2021. Users tap the platform’s distributed node services for proof-of-stake blockchains to stake cryptocurrencies.
Early on Friday morning, an exploiter drained around $5 million in BNB from the platform liquidity pools. The hacker stole the funds by minting six quadrillion aBNBc tokens and then swapping the assets for five million in USD Coin (USDC).
Binance CEO Changpeng spotted the exploit and tweeted to alert community members. Zhao’s post was confirmed by the project itself a few hours later.
A second exploit occurred shortly after the first, according to on-chain security firm Blocksec. This time, the exploiter leveraged delayed asset price updates on Helio, a DeFi lending protocol, to borrow $16 million of the HAY stablecoin.
The exploiter then swapped HAY for BUSD, crashing the price of HAY and causing a depeg for the stablecoin. On-chain showed the exploiter held around $15.5 million in BUSD at press time.
Binance seizes $3 million from first exploiter
CZ informed users that funds linked to the Ankr exploit were seized when he tweeted on Friday. According to the exchange chief, the exploiter moved around $3 million in crypto to the centralized exchange.
