A hacker allegedly stole over $100 million in a recent Solana DeFi platform attack on Wednesday using a market manipulation strategy.
Mango Markets is a Solana DeFi platform that enables users to trade cryptocurrency on Solana for spot margin and perpetual futures.
According to OtterSec, a blockchain auditing business, on October 12, a cyberpunk used price manipulation to increase the value of the collateral and withdraw over $100 million from the Mango Markets Treasury.
The hacker funded an account with 5 million USDC from Circle and offered 483 million units of MNGO perpetual contracts on the order book.
Following that, the attacker went on to purchase the MNGO perpetual contracts for $0.03 apiece. The attacker then began the price manipulation at 6:26 PM ET, pushing MNGO's price from $0.03 to $0.91. Mango Markets Treasury liquidity was drained by obtaining a $116 million loan; the hack affected USDC, MSOL, SOL, BTC, USDT, SRM, and MNGO.
Within 10 minutes, the hacker used USDC to raise the price of MNGO from $0.02 to $0.91.
However, you should be aware that this type of assault is not possible on centralized exchanges; price manipulation was simple for the hacker since MNGO was a sparsely traded token with minimal liquidity on the platform.
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