Deepti Sri · · 2 min readDeFi ‘Robin Hood’ hacker exploits crypto worth $52.8m on Cashio
Solana-based stablecoin protocol Cashio was exploited by a hacker for US$52.8 million after an “infinite mint glitch” enabled the person to mint tokens without providing collateral.
The hacker has been described as a “modern-day Robin Hood” for leaving a note in the input data of the Ethereum transactions that says, “Account with less 100k have been returned. All other money will be donated to charity.”
Photo credit: 123rf.com
According to a report by Bybit, the hacker kept true to his promises and paid out the stolen USDC – a stablecoin that is pegged to the US dollar – to wallet addresses that were worth less than US$100,000. However, there is little evidence of the rest of the money being donated to charity.
Following the hack, the value of Cashio’s token, which is called Cash, tanked to nearly zero. The company cautioned users on minting the tokens and asked users to withdraw their funds from pools as well.
Details of the hack have been broken down in this tweet below.
Another day, another Solana fake account exploit. This time, @CashioApp lost around $50M (based on a quick skim). How did this happen? pic.twitter.com/t7ThWL4zr1
— samczsun (@samczsun) March 23, 2022
Stablecoins based on other protocols have suffered similar attacks in the past. The value of Polygon-based SafeDollar dropped to zero after it was exploited in June 2021, with both USDC and USDT siphoned off by the hacker at the time.
See also: Singapore’s ‘Crypto King’ has no clothes
In December 2020, a group of DeFi (decentralized finance) developers used a similar method of exploitation on Cover, a DeFi insurance project, and minted fake tokens to provide liquidity to trading platform Balancer.
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