These have been difficult holidays for Solana.
After struggling to recover from the debilitating damage caused to the network by the shocking downfall of one of its most prominent backers, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Solana has now suffered a major attack on one of its biggest DeFi protocols.
Early on Friday, Solana’s DeFi protocol, Raydium, announced that a hacker had gained access to the organization’s “owner authority” and used that access to begin draining Raydium’s liquidity pools. DeFi tools allow users to trade, borrow, and lend crypto assets with each other, without intermediaries. And automated market makers like Raydium accomplish this by allowing users to contribute assets to a pool, often in exchange for token rewards.
In the past few hours, a hacker has stolen more than $2.2 million worth of digital assets from such a fund in Raydium, including $1.6 million in SOL, according to analysis by the analytics firm. from blockchain Nansen.
The hacker appears to have carried out the attack using one of the protocol owner’s private keys. It is not yet clear how he accessed that information.
Raydium is one of Solana’s largest decentralized finance protocols, and is considered one of the cornerstones of the blockchain’s DeFi ecosystem. The fact that it was vulnerable to such a top-down method of exploitation led many members of the Raydium community to advise the complete removal of the protocol.
In the minutes after the hack, Raydium’s native token RAY fell just over 8% to $0.16 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko. The total value locked in the protocol has plummeted more than 27% in the same period, to $34.73 million at the time of writing, according to DeFi Llama.
The attack comes just a month after several wallets belonging to then-collapsing FTX were stripped of $650 million in digital assets. Bankman-Fried later claimed that the attack, while not his doing, may have been the work of a former FTX employee. Bankman-Fried was arrested Monday on eight criminal charges, including conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering.
In the days after FTX went bankrupt, it was revealed that the private keys of decentralized exchange Solana and liquidity provider Serum – founded by Bankman-Fried himself – were hosted on FTX. Since Serum was integrated into almost every major Solana DeFi project, including Raydium, the news sent panic throughout the network. Raydium and other protocols were quick to cut their ties with Serum and start a fork of the project that was unaffected by the fallout from FTX.
Friday’s Raydium hack, while not necessarily related to Serum or FTX, indicates that Solana’s concerns are far from over.
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source: decrypt.co