Beanstalks, a decentralized financial protocol on Ethereum that issues the stablecoin Bean (BEAN), suffered a hack that cost it $ 182 million. The attacker transferred some of the stolen funds to a humanitarian aid account for Ukraine.
According to the Etherscan block explorer transaction, the hacker was able to hold about $ 80 million of the stolen funds - $ 24.830 in ether (quotation ETH) and more in other tokens - while the remaining $ 100 million would be used to pay network fees when exchanging tokens and to pay off required loans.
According to analyst firm Peckshield on Twitter, the attacker used a flash loan to obtain ether (ETH) and the BEAN token, which is used for governance within the protocol. To do this, she used the Aave Protocol and Uniswap platforms and the cryptocurrencies DAI (DAI), USD Coin (USDC) and tether (USDT).
With these governance tokens, he was able to gain access to admin permissions thanks to a bogus protocol enhancement proposal he created. The hacker then used Tornado Cash, an Ethereum transaction mixer, to decrease the traceability of funds.
The event had serious consequences for the protocol, and this is reflected for example in the total loss of stability of its stablecoin. Within hours, the stablecoin went from $ 1 in value to an average of $ 0,2, although at the time of writing it was trading at $ 0,13 according to CoinGecko.
At the moment, according to Beanstalks on their Twitter account, they are investigating the incident and asking for help in tracking down the attacker and recovering the stolen funds.
A thief who does charity
In recent times, hacks of decentralized finance platforms have been repeated. However, one of the curiosities of this case is that the attacker used part of the loot to collaborate with a humanitarian cause.
More specifically, hacker Beanstalks sent $ 250.000 worth of stolen cryptocurrencies to donate to Ukraine, a European country experiencing a humanitarian crisis due to its war with Russia. This is possible thanks to the possibility of receiving cryptocurrency donations enabled by the Ukrainian government itself, as reported by this newspaper.
What is Beanstalks?
Beanstalks is a decentralized financial protocol that has at its core the issuance of its own stable cryptocurrency, Bean. Like many others of its kind, Bean tries to have a one-to-one parity with the US dollar.
To ensure this equivalence, the protocol uses a system of credits and economic incentives so that the users of the network themselves contribute to supporting the stability of the cryptocurrency. This method differs from other stablecoins in that it has no collateral, either off-chain like dollars in a bank account or on-chain like bitcoin (BTC) or ether (ETH).
However, it's worth noting that Bean's market cap is still very low compared to other stablecoins. With $ 41,7 million of current capitalization according to CoinMarketCap, it is still far from others like USD Coin ($ 49,969 million), tether ($ 82,751 million) or DAI ($ 9,048 million). Therefore, the multibillion dollar loss suffered as a result of this event can be seen as a major blow to Beanstalks.
