Harvest Finance: $24M Attack Triggers $570M ‘Bank Run’ in Latest DeFi Exploit

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Harvest Finance: $24M Attack Triggers $570M ‘Bank Run’ in Latest DeFi Exploit

An arbitrage trade exploiting weak points in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Harvest Finance led to some $24 million in stablecoins being siphoned away from the project’s pools on Monday, according to CoinGecko.

According to reports, an attacker used a flash loan – a technique that allows a trader to take on massive leverage without any downside – to manipulate DeFi prices for profit. The exploit sent the platform’s native token, FARM, tumbling by 65% in less than an hour, followed by the project’s total value locked (TVL), which dropped from over $1 billion before the exploit to $430 million as of press time.

Mixing the coins didn’t keep the Harvest Finance team in the dark for long. The person behind the exploit “is well-known in the crypto community” after leaving “a significant amount of personally identifiable information,” according to the project’s Discord. All seven bitcoin wallets holding the attacker’s funds are also known.

The anonymous developers behind the project do not want to doxx the party but are instead offering a $100,000 bounty for convincing the attacker to send back the funds.

“For the attacker: you’ve proven your point, if you can return the funds to the users, it would be greatly appreciated by the community, including many bystanders,” the team said via Discord. Read more...