Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
Hot on the heels of Solana’s Cashio stablecoin going to zero, Ethereum based Beanstalk Stablecoin Protocol was yesterday night drained of $182 million.
This attack ultimately meant that the protocol’s associated BEAN stablecoin collapsed, causing a drop of 86% from its $1 peg.
Not sure why it has any value now that this has happened, but it seems people were willing to scoop up this garbage for pennies on the dollar.
Eww.
So I’m going to ask the same question that I keep asking.
Do you know which stablecoin didn’t go to zero?
Hive Backed Dollars (HBD), an actual layer-1 algorithmic stablecoin that is housed on a truly decentralised blockchain.
Yep, HBD didn’t go to zero.
Funny that.
The Ethereum based stablecoin project called Beanstalk was yesterday flash loan attacked.
A flash loan attack is when an attacker borrows funds from somewhere that doesn't require collateral.
Then manipulates the price of another crypto asset on one exchange and allows them to quickly resell it on another one.
This causes excess slippage which drives the value of whichever token they’re exploiting deep down toward zero.
Before the attacker then buys back the token at a deflate to buy back the token at a deflated price.
What we saw here was the attacker taking out a flash loan on the lending platform Aave.
This then enabled him to amass a large amount of Beanstalk’s native governance token, STALK.
With those tokens, they were able to manipulate governance via their newly acquired voting power and thus pass a malicious governance proposal that drained all of the protocol’s funds into their own Ethereum wallet.
Beanstalk was exploited for $182 million in the attack, with the hacker himself making away with at least $80 million.
Talk about being in the wrong line of work as a Web3 blogger…
To top it off, the “team” behind the latest failed stablecoin project had this to say:
“Beanstalk did not use a flash loan resistant measure to determine the % of Stalk that had voted in favor of the BIP. This was the fault that allowed the hacker to exploit Beanstalk.”
The team you trusted with your money just forgot to include a flash loan resistant measure in the code.
This latest saga is yet another lesson that the words “trust” and “stablecoins” should never be found in the same sentence.
Algorithmic stablecoins should never rely on trusting someone and the only way to mitigate stablecoin risk is to use trustless algorithmic stablecoins like HBD.
HBD is a safer, superior algorithmic stablecoin due to its layer-1 status on the Hive blockchain.
With regulations, attacks, hacks and just plain laziness from teams behind stablecoin projects, attention will eventually shift to HBD.
Even if it is simply achieved through attrition.
Best of probabilities to you.
