A techie night ended in turmoil when a Solana-based decentralized exchange, Cypher Protocol, paused operations following a breach leading to an estimated theft of $1 million. Without divulging detailed specifics, a statement issued confirmed the security incident and a freeze on its smart contract late in the evening of August 7 (UTC). An unusual twist saw Cypher inviting the alleged perpetrator for a dialogue about future options, arguably to discuss return of the stolen assets. Cypher remained tight-lipped about the total losses; however, Solana blockchain explorer Solscan suggested a possible loot of $1,015,961, with the culprit’s wallet receiving 38,530 SOL (worth $892,740) and $123,232 in USDC.
Chipping in with similar figures is De.Fi Security, which also observed the start of asset movement shortly after the incident – a clue perhaps about liquidation attempts? A USDC 30,000 transfer to USDC address ‘kiing.sol’, currently holding $102.4 million in 110 tokens like $55 million in SOL and $24.25 million in USDC, reinforces this suspicion.
Ciphers’ security drought occurred even as it hosted the mtnDAO hacker house event with Solana trading protocol Marginfi. Marginfi insists that it continues to work autonomously sans any impact from the exploit. After successfully gleaned $2.1 million in November 2021 through a seed round, Cypher planned to pour the funds into a futures protocol development on Solana. DeFi Llama data reveals a significant leap of its total value locked from $183,380 to $1.57 million by August 3.
This intrusion comes at a time when the cryptography community is still recovering from losing six times the amount in July, a significant increase from $390 million compared to July 2022. Crypto’s unsavory underbelly continues to reveal itself with the Multichain cross-chain bridge suffering the highest loss of $231.1m. Ethereum took the lion’s share of hits with an eye-watering loss of $350.7 million across 36 instances. Binance themselves reported an $11 million loss in 18 cases. Last year’s $7.3m recovery seems pale in comparison to the $7.6m recouped this year, a merely 1.5% improvement. This data serves as a somber reminder of the teething problems that persist in the crypto realm despite its exponential growth.
Source: Cryptonews
