Reckless Yield Farming and the Behavioral Economics of "Ape Season
"Now don't try to kid me man cub, I made a deal with you." Throughout history, humans have tried to put distance between themselves and their primate ancestors. Roughly four billio…
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Inside the $12M Compounder Finance Rug Pull and the Audit That Warned About It
Compounder.finance has rug pulled its users for more than $12,000,000. The project's website and Twitter account were both taken down immediately after the exploit, leaving investi…
Yearn's Buyout Spree Tests DeFi's Decentralisation Claims
Some players are dealt a stronger hand than others, and those who know how to use it can rewrite the rules of the game entirely. In an industry that claims decentralisation as a co…
Inside SushiSwap's Overnight Scramble to Contain a $15,000 Sushibar Exploit
Just as SushiSwap appeared to be regaining its footing, an overnight exploit tested its new leadership. Pseudonymous developer 0xMaki took over lead development of SushiSwap after …
A Single Coinbase Price Feed Triggered $110 Million in Compound Liquidations
On November 26, 2020, a wave of liquidations swept through Compound Finance after the price feed the protocol relied on - an oracle operated by Coinbase - reported a sharp and appa…
Inside the Fake-Jar Exploit That Drained 19.7M DAI From Pickle Finance
Pickle Finance's cDAI jar was drained of 19.7 million DAI through a vulnerability that allowed an attacker to substitute a counterfeit "Pickle Jar" into the protocol's swap logic, …
Flash Loans Aren't the Villain — A Case for DeFi's Most Misunderstood Tool
Falling off a bike and scraping a knee doesn't usually send people looking to give up cycling. A partner's infidelity doesn't have to end someone's dating life for good. A plane cr…
Cheese Bank and Origin Protocol Losses Push November's DeFi Damage Past $45 Million
Two more DeFi protocols were exploited within roughly a day of each other in mid-November 2020, extending a month-long run of flash-loan-driven attacks. Cheese Bank lost $3.3 milli…
Curve Oracle Blind Spot Costs Value DeFi $7 Million
Reputations built on confidence rather than caution tend to be the first to crack. Value DeFi found this out on November 14, 2020, when an attacker drained $7,000,000 from the prot…
Reentrancy Meets Flash Loans - How Akropolis Lost $2 Million in DAI
An attacker combined flash loans with a re-entrancy exploit to drain $2,000,000 in DAI from the Akropolis protocol. In the immediate aftermath, Akropolis administrators initially d…
Geth Consensus Bug Splits Ethereum, Takes Infura Offline
On November 11, 2020, the Ethereum mainnet suffered a network-wide disruption after a consensus-layer flaw surfaced, splitting participants who were still running older versions of…
Crypto Betting Markets and Statisticians Diverge Ahead of the 2020 US Election
Humans have long been drawn to uncertain outcomes, seeking insight and entertainment from predicting the unknowable since long before recorded history. Technology has refined the c…
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