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Mango Market hacker’s attempt to exploit Aave fails Mango Market hacker’s attempt to exploit Aave fails

Mango Market hacker’s attempt to exploit Aave fails

Arkham Intelligence said Eisenberg's real target was AAVE's vulnerable looping system and his borrowings could leave the DeFi network with severe bad debt.

Mango Market hacker’s attempt to exploit Aave fails

Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.

Mango Market’s exploiter Avraham Eisenberg’s attempt to replicate his “highly profitable trading strategy” on Aave (AAVE) has failed, resulting in the loss of millions.

Lookonchain reported that ponzishorter.eth — an address associated with Eisenberg — transferred $40 million USD Coin (USDC) into Aave to borrow Curve (CRV) token with the intention of shorting. This resulted in CRV price tanking 26% to $0.464 from $0.625 over the past week.

However, the move didn’t go entirely as planned as the community rallied behind CRV, buying the DeFi token and causing its value to spike 46% in the last 24 hours to as high as $0.71

Arkham says CRV shorting might be a bait

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence tweeted Eisenberg might be baiting people to believe that he was shorting CRV to cause the liquidation of Michael Egorov, founder of the DeFi network.

According to Arkham Intelligence, Eisenberg’s real target was AAVE’s vulnerable looping system and his borrowings could leave the DeFi network with severe bad debt. The blockchain analytics firm added:

“To liquidate Avi’s position, AAVE liquidators will have no way to buy back all the CRV he borrowed. On-chain, there is no liquidity to pay back more than ~20% of the position. AAVE will have to sell significant amounts of tokens from the safety module to cover this loss.”

In October, Eisenberg explained that it was possible to manipulate Aave lending policies to borrow massively, dump it, and leave Aave with bad debt.

Aave issues statement

Following the failure of the short strategy, Aave said the liquidation process of its CRV pool was successful and went as planned. But it noted that the position was not fully covered as 2.6 million CRV ($1.6 million) remained, representing less than 0.1% of the positions on the protocol.

Gauntlet Network, the financial modeling company managing Aave, said it will cover the loss through its insolvency refund program. The firm added that it has made several proposals in the past few weeks to mitigate these types of attacks.

A new governance proposal is now live on Aave that will prevent another price manipulation on the platform.

Meanwhile, the Aave community pointed out that the developers could have done something to prevent this scenario as they had received several warnings about the possibility previously.

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Posted In: DeFi