Solana-Based Mango Protocol Suffers $100M+ Exploit

Mango Markets became the victim of this week’s latest exploit. Crypto cannot seem to avoid an abhorrent Tuesday. Two exploits less than one day apart – and less than a week after the BNB Chain exploit that utilized a bridge to create millions of new BNB. A nine-figure hack has been discovered by Solana’s Mango Markets. A hacker stole over $100M from the protocol through price manipulations and high-dollar leverage.

Let’s look at this latest exploit and what we know in the early hours.

There is Pressure and Price 

We’re fresh off the heels of a massive, six-figure exploit of Binance Bridge that resulted in newly minted tokens in the range of $500M in value. Even though it is not as expensive, there’s a million dollar security flaw in Ethereum-based Temple DAO. This news has been around for less than one day. This latest combination, along with the trio from October, is a stark reminder of how critical smart contract security management and risk management in this area. According to data from DefiLlama, the Mango Markets lending program was among the five most popular TVLs on the Solana Blockchain.

Mango Markets protocol (MNGO), was virtually drained Tuesday after an exploit.Source: MNGOUSD at TradingView.com | Source: MNGO-USD on TradingView.com

Mango Counters, Offers Bounty

Mango Markets has advised usersFollowing the exploit, the victim has been asked not to make any deposits into the protocol and to notify the hackers about a bug bounty. With this, critics have surfaced Discord screenshots from earlier this year that show channel moderators acknowledging concerns about exactly what seemed to have led to Mango’s downfall: massive futures bets against themselves and price manipulation, effectively taking advantage of a low-volume trading token.

Meanwhile, in their initial response, Mango has described the action as “oracle price manipulation.”

Featured Image from Pixabay. Charts from TradingView.com
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