Yet Another DeFi Protocol Lost Hundreds of Millions After Hack
DeFi lending stablecoin protocol Beanstalk shutdown on Sunday, April 17th, resulting in $181 million in various tokens going missing.
“Beanstalk was exploited today. The Beanstalk Farms team is investigating the attack and will make an announcement to the community as soon as possible“, Beanstalk wrote on its official Twitter page following the hack.
According to a thread of tweets by crypto researcher Igor Igamberdiev, the hacker was able to swipe $76 million. According to researchers, the attack was not a ‘bridge’ exploit as in the case of Ronin, but a flash loan attack.
The hacker subsequently used the acquired assets to vote for a BIP18 governance proposal that moved all funds from the protocol contract to the bad actor. The exploiter then “donated” 250,000 USDC to the Ukraine Crypto Fund before using another portion to pay off the flash loans.
He later converted the remaining funds into 24,000 wETH ($76 million), some of which were sent the crypto mixer Tornado Cash, while the rest (the original amount used to launch the attack) was withdrawn using the DeFi bridge Synapse.
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Following a series of attacks on DeFi protocols over the past six months, Tornado Cash has increasingly come under criticism for allegedly aiding investment fraud. The protocol is already under intense scrutiny from U.S. regulators following a hack in which around $625 million were stolen from Ronin, the blockchain network backing the Axie Infinity crypto game.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
