$47M stolen from Vietnamese blockchain platform by hackers

42 views 7:37 am 0 Comments November 23, 2023

“Dear KyberSwap Elastic Users. We are sorry that KyberSwap Elastic has experienced a security incident. As a precaution, we strongly advise all users to withdraw their funds promptly,” Kyber Network’s official account on X, formerly known as Twitter, posted Thursday morning.


A Kyber representative said its team is dealing with the issue and would not comment further.


The Block, citing blockchain data, revealed that Kyber’s liquidity pools had been attacked by hackers, who stole $7 million worth of Ethereum, $20.7 million worth of Arbitrum, $15 million worth of Optimism, $3 million worth of Polygon and $2 million worth of Base. The total amount of cryptocurrency stolen amounted to over $47 million, all of which had been transferred to a single digital wallet.


Following the attack, the alleged hackers left a message saying negotiations could begin in a few hours.


An account named 0xngmi, a member of the cryptocurrency data analysis site DefiLlama, wrote on X, “Seems like a hacker is just draining the Kyber LP pools.”


Data from DefiLlama revealed that the total amount of property that users sent into the Kyber project has seen their values drop from $86 million to $27 million following the announcement of the attack.


The price of the KNC token by Kyber network has also dropped from $0.756 at around 6 a.m. to $0.721 at around 6:35 a.m. By noon, the token’s price was hovering at about $0.725.


Kyber Network was established in 2017 by Loi Luu, Victor Tran, and Yaron Velner. It was one of the first blockchain projects Vietnamese developed and garnered international attention. The main products of Kyber Network include the decentralized platform KyberSwap and the digital property management platform Krystal.


KyberSwap Elastic is ranked 25th among the global cryptocurrency market, with the total value of transactions within 24 hours at $31.6 million, accounting for 0.592% of the market, according to Coinmarketcap.


After detecting a potential vulnerability, Kyber Network also told users to withdraw their money from the platform in April. In September last year, Kyber also confirmed that hackers attacked it and stole $265,000 worth of cryptocurrency.