The yield farming project Meerkat Finance, which is one of the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) applications that runs on the Binance Smart Chain, the exchange’s proprietary blockchain, was hacked a short while ago.
During this hacking attack, as much as $31 million was stolen from the smart contract.
The project, as mentioned, focuses on yield farming for the BNB pair, i.e. Binance Coin, and BUSD, i.e. Binance’s stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.
Hackers exploited a flaw by changing the address property of the smart contract this very morning, at an estimated time of 9 AM (UTC).
Since then, the hackers have taken BNB from the smart contract, withdrawing as much as 73,635.23 BNB, which is currently worth an impressive $17.67 million. This was followed by 13.9 million in BUSD. The hacker’s address is called FakePhishing17 and he proceeded to move and divide all the BNB into different wallets with seven transactions of 5,000 BNB, one of 10,000 BNB, one of 23,000 BNB, and so on.
Suspicions about the hacked DeFi project
The strangest thing and one that generates suspicion is that since then the Meerkat Finance team has disappeared after making a small announcement on their Telegram channel and both their website and Twitter accounts have been disabled, which would actually suggest an exit scam rather than a hacking attack.
For the time being, the CEO of Binance, Chanpeng Zhao, has not yet posted any comment.
The Wine Swap scam and Binance’s intervention
In October 2020, another project created on the Binance Smart Chain had run away with the loot, namely Wine Swap, an AMM service that was very similar to Uniswap.
A month later, Binance announced that it had frozen all funds involved in the scam and had thus recovered a total of more than $345,000 in various crypto assets.
