Celo Blockchain’s Moola Market Exploited: Details
- Moola Market, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform based on well-known Celo blockchain has been exploited and the hacker has made away with more than 8 million USD.
- The hacker stole 1.8 million MOO tokens (worth 655,000 USD), 8 million CELO (about $6.5 million USD), 765,000 cEUR (worth 750,000 USD), and 644,000 cUSD (worth 639,000 USD).
- Furthermore, all the activities on the open-source protocol for decentralized money markets, i.e., Moola Market, has been paused.
Celo blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Moola Market has recently caught the plague of attacks in the crypto markets.
Moola Market’s development team has confirmed the $8.5 million hack via a Twitter post, revealing that all the activities on the open-source protocol for decentralized money markets has been paused.
Moreover, the team has requested users not to trade any mTokens. According to the announcement, Moola Market has already contacted relevant law enforcement agencies and has taken steps to make it difficult for the attacker to liquidate the funds.
The team initially stated that it was willing to negotiate a bounty payment with the attacker in exchange for returning the stolen funds. Interestingly, according to the latest development, 93.1% of funds have been returned to the Moola governance multisig after the negotiations.
The announcement further states:
“We have continued to pause all activity on Moola, and will follow up with the community about next steps, and to safely restart operations of the Moola protocol.”
The hacker attacked Moola Market using a quite straightforward and typical approach. First, they completed a buying order of 243,000 CELO from Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Next, they lent 60,000 CELO to Moola and borrowed 1.8 million MOO tokens, Moola’s native token. The final stage was to use the remaining CELO tokens to borrow MOO and raise its price.
The attacker was successful in stealing 1.8 million MOO tokens (worth 655,000 USD), 8 million CELO (about $6.5 million USD), 765,000 cEUR (worth 750,000 USD), and 644,000 cUSD (worth 639,000 USD).
Renowned researcher for The Block, Igor Igamberdiev first noticed the hack on Moola Market and broke the news earlier on Wednesday.
Moola Market, which is responsible for providing non-custodial liquidity protocol on the Celo blockchain, came under attack at a time when the crypto market is experiencing a record number of hacks.
BitKeep Wallet, a prominent digital asset wallet in Asia, was recently hacked to steal crypto worth around $1 million, according to blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
