Solana-based Nirvana Finance suffers a flash loan attack with the hacker draining around $3.5 million in funds.
The Solana network’s DeFi platform Solend protocol later acknowledged the exploit. The Solend team is in touch with Nirvana to see how they can help, and besides Nirvana has not yet made an official statement regarding the attack.
Actually, Nirvana Finance has two tokens: ANA, a volatile asset with a rising floor price that is backed by reserves, and NIRV, a stablecoin.
The past few hours have seen a significant decline for both tokens. Nirvana’s stablecoin NIRV has depleted by almost 90%, and ANA by about 85%.
The hacker borrowed $10M USDC from the main pool vault using flash loans by Solend Protocol. Then the hacker minted $10M worth of $ANA using the funds borrowed from Solend.
The hacker then converted the $ANA into USDT and received $3.5M from the Nirvana Treasury. In addition, the Solend pool received the $10M USDC back at that point.
The Nirvana hacker converted the USDT into USDCet and then used Wormhole to transfer the money to an ETH account.
At the time of writing, stablecoin NIRV is trading at a price of $0.176 and ANA is trading at a price of $1.83.
Flash loan attacks seem to be hackers’ favorite thing during this ongoing crypto winter. Three weeks back, Solana DeFi Protocol Crema Finance suffered an $8.8M hack. Following the exploit, the protocol had to suspend its smart contract.