MonoX Losses Over $30 million in WETH and MATIC

One news that never seems to get old in the decentralized finance (DeFi) scene is that of a security breach. MonoX, a DeFi project, has confirmed that it is a victim of a recent hack where perpetrators took over $30 million worth of digital tokens from its platform. 

MonoX is Exploited

The DeFi project, which provides single token liquidity pools, announced the hack on Twitter, revealing that the hackers exploited a loophole in its swap contract to boost MONO token price. This allowed them to use the coin to buy other digital assets. 

This morning our contract has been exploited. We are sorry to our users who have deposited funds. The team is investigating and will try our very best to get the stolen funds back. We thank our community for your support.

— MonoX (@MonoXFinance) November 30, 2021

According to available data, around $18 million worth of wrapped Ether (WETH) plus around $10 million worth of Polygon (MATIC) were stolen. Other digital assets like GHST, WBTC, LINK, MIM, and IMC account for the remaining missing $3 million.

According to a statement released by the team, it would be working towards recovering the stolen funds whilst assuring its community members that the “entire team and partners are all working on this right now.” 

It continued that “Security of users’ funds is of utmost importance to us and we have had multiple security audits and a security advisor firm that work with us on an an ongoing basis”

As of press time, the attack hasn’t affected the prices of the stolen tokens, except that of MONO token which has tanked.

DeFi Hacks in 2021

While the DeFi market has witnessed more growth and adoption in 2021, one of its major albatrosses has been the spate of attacks that have resulted in lost funds for different projects this year.

A report from Elliptic, a crypto data analytics company, revealed that the space alone has lost over $10 billion to frauds, theft and, hacks.

Though there have been a number of notable hacks, that of Poly Network which lost around $610 million to an ethical hacker who later returned most of the funds claiming he only wanted to show the project the vulnerabilities in its network, remains the most significant this year.

Other attacks with fewer happy endings in the space include those on Cream Finance, Compound, Harvest Finance, and others. This has led to a call for more audits of DeFi projects to rectify vulnerabilities before they’re exploited, as unaudited projects account for around 80% of the hacks.

However, auditing alone seems not to be the solution to these attacks because MonoX stated that it had been audited by Harlborn and Peckshield yet, none of them discovered the vulnerability exploited by the hacker.