Cream Finance is a DeFi lending and borrowing protocol that runs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Cream Finance Suffers Major Hack
Confirming this hack, Cream Finance tweeted that,
“With the help of friends from @iearnfinance and others in the community, we were able to identify the vulnerabilities and patch them. In the meantime, we’ve paused our v1 lending markets on Ethereum, and we’re in the process of putting together a post-mortem review.”
Following this hack, Cream Finance has lost over $130 million. The hack was first identified by PeckShield that stated that the hacker could part away with this amount by exploiting a large flash loan transaction.
Blockchain data shows that two separate amounts of $92 million and $23 million were stolen from two wallet addresses. Additional funds were also stolen. The investigation into the transfer of this amount shows that the hacker is transferring them to different wallet addresses.
The hacker also left a bizarre message on the transaction reading,
“Baave lucky, iron bank lucky, cream not. ydev: incest bad, don’t do.”
The message could show that the hacker had attempted to exploit other DeFi lending platforms.
The stolen funds were in Cream LP tokens and other ERC-20 tokens. Since the details of this hack were made public, the value of the CREAM token has dropped by around 28% to $106 at the time of writing, according to data from CoinGecko.
Third Hack on DeFi Platform
As aforementioned, this is the third time that Cream Finance is suffering from a major hack. In February, hackers stole $37.5 million from the DeFi platform in a flash loan exploit. In August, Cream Finance has been hacked once again, resulting in a multi-million loss. The hacker made away with over 418 AMP tokens and around 1300 Ethereum tokens during this second attack.
While Cream Finance has suffered from frequent hacks, the platform is not the only one in the DeFi space to suffer from similar hacks. In August, the Poly Network suffered from a $600 million hack, which turned out to be the largest DeFi hack in history. While the hacker ended up returning most of the stolen money, it shed a negative light on the DeFi sector.
Following the rising number of DeFi hacks, protocols that offer crypto lending and borrowing services have been forced to install better consumer protection measures to protect funds from being stolen. Among the people who have called for increased safety in the DeFi sector is the US Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler.
Gensler has previously addressed the issues that affect the DeFi sector and called the sector out for its lack of regulations. Gensler has earlier stated that DeFi was a “misnomer” and even stated that most of the tokens that operate in the DeFi sector could be unregistered securities.
Gensler gave a speech earlier this week at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit, where he stated that the DeFi sector would not have a good ending unless these platforms implemented better consumer protection measures.
“There is a lot of lending going on. There’s a lot of trading going on. And without protection, I fear that it’s going to end poorly,“
the SEC chief stated.