Mango Exploited for $100 Million

A

hacker has taken over $100 million from Mango, a decentralized finance platform hosted on the Solana blockchain.

Decentralized crypto exchange Mango, based on the Solana blockchain, offers users leverage and spot trading. In the last few days, however, prices for the platform's native MNGO token have plummeted 42% due to reports of possible exploitation.

According to OtterSec's Robert Chen, the attacker "was able to take out large loans against it [the overvalued MGNO governance token] and then drain Mango's [liquidity] pools." In other words, the individual borrowed money using an asset as collateral which was worth more than it should have been. Therefore, they were able to drainage Mango's financial resources little-by-little without being detected until it was too late.

Chen states that the attacker's methods for inflating MNGO's value to the Mango protocol are currently unknown. However, there are already several theories about how the theft could've been committed circulating on Twitter.

On Tuesday, Mango acknowledged the hack in a tweet and said it was "investigating an incident where a hacker was able to drain funds from Mango via an oracle price manipulation."

The money that was drained remains, as of this writing, on the Solana blockchain. Other exchanges like Coinbase, Binance and Kraken – who have enough liquidity for someone to cash out these large amounts - have blacklisted similar addresses in past cases.

Mike

An editor at Coincrop

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Jonathan is a Coincrop staff writer based in the UK, covering the best rates for cryptocurrency earning and borrowing products. When not at work, he's likely sailing.