$745 000 USD

MAY 2021

GLOBAL

AUTOSHARK

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

"AutoShark is a yield optimizer for Automatic Liquidity Acquisition Farms & AMMs on the Binance Smart Chain. It is forked from PancakeBunny, and offers unparalleled access to farming opportunities through the use of superior yield strategies and auto-compounding vaults." "Autoshark was nearly 1:1 fork of PancakeBunny."

 

"Amidst the numerous rug pulls that have happened over the past month, it will be inevitable that some investors will fall for the scams even if they have a favorite yield optimizer platform to be on. At AutoShark, we make sure to work only with the most established projects so yield farmers can have peace of mind when their assets are with us."

 

"The DeFi protocol AutoShark Finance on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) was attacked by a lightning loan." "[A]part from copying all the logic, [the development team] also copied the flawed logic responsible for the PancakeBunny hack." "A hacker exploited AutoShark with a flash loan attack to gain 100M Shark tokens. The price of shark tokens dropped 95% after the hacker swapped all shark tokens to BNB." "As a result, the hacker has taken out 2.2k WBNB."

 

"Exploiter used $36,800,000, 100,000 BNB for the attack, and approximately 2,500 BNB was exploited — $822,800. 100,000,000 SHARK tokens were minted and used to drained all the liquidity in the LP pool because our token market cap was small (only at $2,000,000 approx) SHARK tokens, which are sold immediately via 1inch -> AnySwap."

 

"No vaults were compromised. All funds are safe except for the dip in SHARK prices. The exploit crashed the price of SHARK from $1.2 to $0.01." "The currency price suffered a flash crash, with a drop of more than 99% at one time, loss of 750,000 USD."

 

"[T]he AutoShark team [is] almost ready with the relaunch of the[ir] platform." They "have decided to go ahead with WatchPug for a full audit instead of Peckshield." "We are double and triple-checking our codebase."

 

"We will be issuing a new token $JAWS to migrate and compensate the Original SHARK Holders for lost Market Cap (there were zero losses from our Vaults). The new token, $JAWS, will be distributed to all SHARK and LP Holders."

 

"We will be airdropping JAWS for SHARK holders/SHARK LP holders together with the launch of the platform. Audited products such as the JAWS for WBNB vault must be released along with the airdrop to avoid the downward selling pressure of the new token." "Airdrops for users who bought and made losses after the exploit will be scheduled at a later date. The original SHARK holders who were there from the start will be prioritized in the first phase of recovery." "Post-exploit buyers will be reimbursed after the full relaunch."

 

"Words cannot express how thankful we are to have such a supportive community! We promise to do our best for the defi space. Autoshark will continue to provide the best yield in the yield optimiser space!"

AutoShark was a copy of PancakeBunny, which included an exploit where the market price could be manipulated for profit. An attack used a flash loan to raise a lot of capital for the exploit.

 

In the end, they did an airdrop of tokens from the development wallet, without minting new tokens.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

In a smart contract environment, the use of a proper price oracle can prevent such price exploits.

 

In general, an exchange platform could keep funds safer by placing the majority of them in an offline multi-signature arrangement. Smart contracts are effectively open source hot wallets.

 

Check Our Framework For Safe Secure Exchange Platforms

Sources And Further Reading

 For questions or enquiries, email info@quadrigainitiative.com.

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