Beanstalk Stablecoin Protocol Hacked for at Least $76M

Beanstalk, an Ethereum decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has been hit with a hack and lost $76 million, a report said.

The report noted that the attacker made use of a flash loan exploit, draining the protocol’s funds early Sunday (April 17) morning.

The attacker proceeded to use Uniswap to trade DAI, USDC and USDT for Ethereum, which netted them 24,830 Ethereum, coming out to around $76 million at the current prices.

However, the report said that the actual loss is likely much higher.

The attacker had already also started siphoning funds via Ethereum’s mixer Tornado Cash, which hid the transaction history.

See also: North Korea Hack Nets $625M on Heels of Crypto Developer Sentencing

PYMNTS wrote that crypto hacks have been becoming more widespread, with numerous cases cropping up in the last several years.

One of them involved a North Korean hack, in which the country was reportedly behind a $625 million theft on the DeFi project Ronin Network.

Ronin was a cross-chain payments bridge protocol, letting users of the NFT game Axie Infinity swap their crypto for one needed for the game.

That allowed them to do away with exchange transaction fees, through locking collateral into the bridge.

These sorts of projects have been hit hard this year. The report says almost all of the $1.3 billion stolen by hackers in the first quarter of the year came from DeFi.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) formally added the address of the wallet the thieves used for their stolen crypto to a list of those owned by the North Korean Lazarus Group, according to those monitoring the case.

The Lazarus Group’s thefts are thought to fund the North Korean nuclear weapons program.