A major blow to decentralised finance: hackers have managed to exploit a flaw in the Qubit Finance platform bridge, stealing more than $80 million in the form of BNB. Qubit Finance is currently trying to establish contact with the individuals in order to reach a common agreement.
A blow to Qubit Finance
Hackers managed to steal 206,809 BNB tokens from X-Bridge, Qubit Finance’s bridge protocol, which allows tokens to be exchanged between the Ethereum blockchain (ETH) and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
Did @QubitFin just get hacked for $80M? Check out this address: https://t.co/1Oao54Ndnb
– claudeshannon.eth ⛽️ (@0xclaudeshannon) January 27, 2022
Hackers have managed to take advantage of a logical flaw in the Qubit Finance code that allows them to withdraw BNB tokens without depositing ETH.
Fooling the protocol into believing that funds had been deposited, the hackers initially stole over 77,000 qXETH, with the ETH passing through X-Bridge. The feat was repeated several times until they were able to drain the equivalent in NBBs from the bridge, worth over $80 million at the time of the hack.
Certik, a company that operates in blockchain security, has written a technical report of the attack which is available on its Medium blog.
The Qubit Finance team is trading
Through several tweets, Qubit Finance has tried to get in touch with the hackers in the hope of a dialogue or even a possible return of funds.
– Qubit Finance (@QubitFin) January 28, 2022
Without any assurance of a positive response from the individuals, she did offer them the maximum reward for a critical hack report, which is $250,000.
It remains to be seen whether the individuals concerned will be won over by such an offer, but agreements between hackers and different platforms have already been reached in the past.
One example is Poly Network’s massive hack on the Binance Smart Chain in August 2021, in which more than $600 million was stolen in the form of cryptocurrencies. The hacker eventually returned all the stolen funds and was even offered a job as head of security at Poly Network, which he turned down.
What impact for the market?
The price of QBT, the Qubit Finance token, has fallen rapidly from $0.006 to $0.004 at the time of writing, representing a 31% drop over 24 hours.
7 day QBT rate (Source: CoinGecko)
Regarding the exchange platform, all services have been temporarily paused except for the withdrawal.
Hacks, exploits, rug pulls and other malicious schemes are unfortunately commonplace in the cryptocurrency world. Last month, $30 million was stolen from the Grim Finance protocol. Several scams also surfaced earlier this year, such as the fake MetaMask token.
The Immunefi platform, which rewards people for finding bugs or flaws in various blockchain-related projects, had published a report estimating the total losses of the DeFi ecosystem to be more than $10 billion in 2021 alone.
