With hardly a week left for the year-end, the cryptocurrency industry has been hit by yet another exploit. This time, it is the staking and farming platform Bent Finance.
After confirming the breach today, Bent Finance urged investors to withdraw their funds from the platform.
It all started on Monday when the platform informed its users about “possible exploit.” Bent Finance soon disabled reward claims and revealed that no funds were lost. But blockchain security and data analytics company, Peckshield notified locating the hacked transaction was conducted from Bent Finance’s deployer. This was enough to spawn rug pull concerns.
The platform also revealed observing the same and said they were “working through it” after employing two independent white hat developers. Soon after, Bent Finance issued a statement that read,
“There was an exploit from the bent deployer address, it added balance of cvxcrv and mim to an address on an unverified update 20 days ago. We just discovered this today. There are multiple members on this team and we will make this right. We recommend you withdraw all funds until it is clear.”
While the platform is yet to confirm the total amount stolen, crypto fraud investigator Joe McGill revealed that the malicious entities managed to siphon off with nearly 440 Ether (ETH) worth over $1.6 million. Meanwhile, the company vowed to recover the stolen funds from Bent curve pools and asked its users to withdraw from the protocol until further notice.
Scams have continued to hinder the growth and adoption of the industry. A unique type of scam, called ‘Rug pulls,’ became a buzzword this year.
According to Chainalysis’ latest report, as the DeFi ecosystem witnessed tremendous expansion this year, rug pulls emerged as the go-to scam. As a matter of fact, rug pulls accounted for an astonishing 37% of over $7.7 billion in total illicit revenue from cryptocurrency scams in 2021, as opposed to just 1% last year.
The research firm called rug pulls the “latest innovation” in scamming. Overall, rug pulls managed to steal almost $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency from victims in 2021. For the uninitiated, rug pulls can be a scam when developers steal investors’ funds and abandon seemingly legitimate projects after a significant amount is allocated.
The biggest rug pull of this year was the Turkish centralized crypto exchange Thodex. Users lost more than $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency after the platform’s CEO disappeared after the exchange temporarily halted withdrawals. This was the only rug pull case for a centralized exchange as all others occurred on DeFi projects this year.