Another DeFi platform took a major hit today, as the decentralized, credit-based stablecoin Beanstalk (with it’s stablecoin $BEAN) has broken it’s peg following a roughly $80M hack. Speculation has been left, right and center and a number of sleuths have been tracking the movement of funds and studying the exploit that has likely left Beanstalk Farms in the dust. Let’s look at what we know from the early hours since the hack. Beanstalk Farms’ Hack: What Went Down The transaction on Etherscan shows that the hacker used what’s commonly known as a ‘flash loan attack,’ one that has been seen on DeFi protocols previously. A flash loan in crypto allows a user to borrow and repay a loan in a single transaction, which minimizes risk for lenders and can streamline processes for borrowers. In the Beanstalk Farms hack, the hacker borrowed nearly a third of the BEAN supply, roughly 32 million tokens and utilized Curve Finance’s $3Crv tokens to generate a unique tokens ‘BEAN3CRV-f’ and ‘BEAN3LUSD-f.’ The attacker utilized these two new tokens to deceive Beanstalk’s governance model and gave the hacker a massive majority holding of ‘seeds,’ the platform’s governance token. With such a larger holding of seeds, the hacker had the contractual capability to execute an ’emergency governance action,’ siphoning massive amounts of funds from ...
