This is information that the crypto space would have done well without. Qubit Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that allows users to loan and speculate on cryptocurrency price variations, has been hacked.
On January 27, hackers stole 206,809 binance coins worth $80 million, according to the platform.
The day after the hack, January 28, Qubit Finance said it was in contact with the hacker(s) and offered them a bounty to return the stolen money.
But it looks like they declined the platform’s initial offer as Qubit raised the bounty to $1 million.
Qubit Finance does not say if the hacker(s) followed up. On Sunday, the platform took to Twitter again to beg hackers to bring back the loot. “We’d like to offer the exploiter the highest bounty in history.”
How Did the Crypto Hack Happen?
“The Qubit protocol was subject to an exploit to our QBridge deposit function,” the platform explained in a post on Medium.
“For the non-technical readers, essentially what the attacker did is take advantage of a logical error in Qubit Finance’s code that allowed them to input malicious data and withdraw tokens on Binance Smart Chain when none were deposited on Ethereum. All this, despite several failsafes,” explained blockchain security firm CertiK.
In addition to lending and borrowing services, Qubit Finance operates an Ethereum-BSC bridge, an infrastructure that connects blockchains. It was this bridge that was targeted.
This is the seventh biggest hacking in the young history of decentralized finance (DeFi) – which cuts out middlemen – considered as the future of financial services, according to DeFiYield. The biggest hack remains the theft of $602 million from the platform Poly Network in September 2021.
In all, almost $3 billion in the form of cryptocurrencies has been stolen by hackers from DeFi platforms.
Marketplace OpenSea, the eBay of the crypto space, announced this week that it will reimburse users $1.8 million after a bug recently allowed hackers to buy NFTs on the OpenSea platform well below the price offered by the owners.
Apart from DeFi, other segments of the crypto sphere are also affected by hacks. Crypto.com, one of the largest exchange platforms, was recently the victim of a theft of bitcoin and ethereum with a total value of more than 35 million dollars.
All these incidents are not likely to reassure investors, especially as it occurs in the midst of a collapse in crypto prices. It is likely to reinforce the regulators to strictly supervise the industry.