$1 200 000 USD

SEPTEMBER 2021

GLOBAL

GROWINGFI

DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS

"Growing.fi is the best-in-class Decentralized Finance (DeFi) aggregation platform. We devote ourselves to making DeFi easier for everyone and make Growing.fi your gateway to the world of DeFi."

 

"Growing.fi start as a Defi portfolio management tool (aka Growing Dashboard) on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) back in March 2021."

 

"Since then, the Growing Dashboard has been used and loved by tens of thousands of yield farmers. We received a lot of love and feedback from our growing community. Among all feedback and feature requests, native smart contract integration for farming platforms is most requested. It also aligns with our goal to become not only the dashboard but also the portal for Defi."

 

"Inspired by PancakeBunny, Beefy, and Autofarm. Growing Farms is yet another yield optimizer platform on BSC, focusing on providing auto-compounded yields by actively finding, auditing, and leveraging the best yield farming platforms through smart optimizing strategies. With the on-chain farm performance data we collected, Growing Farm stands in a superior position to provide best-in-class returns."

 

"The smart contracts of Growing Farm is a remix of Sushi, Auto, Bunny, and many other prior arts. We have tested them on BSC Testnet, Mainnet, and other EVM compatible networks for a few weeks. However, they have not been audited yet. You are strongly suggested to read the source code of our smart contracts and do please give us feedback if you find anything we can improve."

 

On July 8th, a CertiK audit "report [was] prepared for GrowingFi to discover issues and vulnerabilities in the source code of the GrowingFi project as well as any contract dependencies that were not part of an officially recognized library. A comprehensive examination has been performed, utilizing Static Analysis and Manual Review techniques."

 

"There is one noticeable high privilege role across different contracts in the GrowingFi project. The owner can modify critical configurations for one or more contracts. If an attacker takes control over any one of the roles, the actions he can perform will endanger the users' farming reward and the value of the Grow token. The overly powerful owner is a centralization risk as he can perform actions without obtaining the consensus of the community."

 

"On 14th Sep 2021, Growing Farm on BSC and Polygon was attacked, resulting in a loss of funds for about $1.2M. Only assets in the v2 pool were affected. We have fixed and upgraded all affected contracts."

 

"The issue was related to the `_withdraw` function in v2 pools. While v1 checks for the principal amount, the v2 pools removed that and caused insufficient validation for user inputs. The attacker exploited it with a small amount of deposit and calling `withdraw()` with a large amount of `wantedAmount`."

 

"There was no attack, these projects are finished, the scammed people, running a mixture of ponzi scheme + slow rug pull scheme : where they pretend to be legit and hardworking but in real they just typing tech con men."

 

"Still waiting for your comments on, $1.2m the yesterday theft by one or team of devs on @GrowingFi, exploited the smart contract and emptied out the LP tokens of people. @certik_io didn't say anything and on their website everything is fine."

 

"is @RektHQ really not going to cover the 1.2M stolen by @GrowingFi ???"

 

"A team member resigned and deleted his account due to the threats he received. We the rest of the team understand and will carry on the development and the going-forward plan."

 

"Since our own funds have also been affected and lost almost all of them. We will be using all the rest of the funds we have (the Dev Fund and personal funds from the team members) to compensate as many users affected as possible."

 

"1. The first stage of the compensation will be covering all the users affected with an amount less than $100, all and each of them will be compensated 100% of the funds they lose immediately in BUSD/USDC; 2. If there are any funds left after the first stage, we will continue to compensate users with amounts between $100 and $1000 proportionally in both BUSD/USDC and GROW/PLOW; 3. Users affected with the amount > $1000 will be getting the creditor token to the Auction and received funds sold according to the original plan."

 

"We are rolling out a 3 stage compensation plan. Includes an auction to sell the ownership of our project to raise money to compensate the affected users." "Based on the going-forward plan we announced earlier, an auction sale of the project will be held to remedy the victims."

 

"We are very thankful and humbled to announce that we have secured a sum of $100k of funding in exchange for the future design and dev service from the dev team, 100% of it will be used to remedy the victims of the attack;" "We are and will continue to do everything we can to remedy all the affected users."

Despite an audit from CertiK, the GrowingFi platform smart contract hot wallet still suffered a significant theft. The platform ran multiple attempts to create a recovery for their affected users and it appears they may have compensated a large portion of the funds, though nowhere near all of them.

HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?

There are a number of ways to prevent and mitigate this situation. It is far more secure to have the majority of funds in a multi-signature wallet where keys are stored offline by multiple operators. This would limit the potential loss to only those funds being actively within the hot wallet. Audits can be used to reduce the risks on the hot wallets further, and we advocate at least 2 reviews would be required prior to a project launch. We also propose a comprehensive industry insurance fund which could be available to assist.

 

Check Our Framework For Safe Secure Exchange Platforms

Sources And Further Reading

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

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