When a hacker took advantage of the BNB Chain-based Protocol Ankr and dumped Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc) tokens, a trader took advantage of the price differences and made $15.5 million from $2,879 worth of tokens.
As Asian Trade has already reported, the security firm Beosin said that the multimillion-dollar exploit might have been caused by flaws in the smart contract code and hacked private keys caused by a technical update. The price of NBC dropped a lot after the hacker made and sold 20 trillion aBNBc tokens.
As this was happening, a trader moved quickly to take advantage of a chance. Using data from on-chain, the analysis platform Lookonchain recently shared how a trader allegedly made $15,500,000 by using the Helio Protocol platform. Lookonchain says that the trader got 183,885 aBNBc for just 10 BNB after the Ankr exploiter dumped the aBNBc.
The trader then put the ABNBc into the Helio Protocol and used the money to borrow 16 million HAY tokens. In the end, the trader sold the HAY for 15.5 million Binance USD (BUSD), which was 5,209 times more than what they started with.
Related: NFTs are still “in high demand,” as the number of unique traders rose 18% in October, according to DappRadar.
Aside from the trade losses, the exploit may have also caused Helio’s total locked value to go down. Before the attack, there were about 87 million TVL in the Hay stablecoin. At the time this was written, however, the decentralised finance data tracker DefiLlama showed that HAY no longer had any TVL.
In an announcement to its community, Helio Protocol told users that their assets were safe and that all of their staked BNB was in the validators. At the moment, the protocol has stopped doing anything and has asked HAY holders to stop making any deals.
Ankr said that it will be reissuing aBNBc tokens after asking decentralised exchanges to stop trading. The platform said it would look into the situation and give affected users money.
More information: We’ve talked to the DEXes and told them to stop trading. After we figure out what’s going on, we will reissue tokens in the future.
December 2, 2022 — Ankr (@ankr)
In the meantime, Binance stopped Ankr token withdrawals and froze assets worth $3 million that the hacker had moved to the trading platform.