More than $150 million has been lost this week in separate security breaches at DeFi projects MonoX and BadgerDAO.
Multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) MonoX (MONO) suffered a cyber attack on Nov. 30 leading to about $31 million in losses. BadgerDAO (BADGER) suffered a front-end attack that was discovered on Dec. 2 with estimates of Badger’s losses hitting more than $120 million.
The MonoX DEX platform suffered a single attack on Nov. 30. In this attack, a bug in the smart contract allowed for a discrepancy to exist between prices of assets, when manually changed.
Rekt News explained that hackers were able to inflate the price of MONO via the smart contract, then buy up other assets from the protocol with MONO.
“The hacker created a loop in which the price of tokenOut would overwrite the price of tokenIn, pumping the price of MONO over the course of many ‘swaps.’”
The MonoX team confirmed as much in a Nov. 30 tweet. In a postmortem published on Dec. 2, total losses were confirmed at about $31 million. The team added:
“Days like yesterday are horrible, there is no sugar coating the harsh reality of a contract being exploited and people losing money. Our supporters put their faith in a new project like us, and yesterday we let them down.”
MONO listed on Huobi only five days before the hack on MonoX.
The Badger security breach was an ongoing threat to users interacting with Badger DAO’s platform rather than a single large exploit.
Discord users began reporting unusual spend requests from the Badger platform and alerted admins on social media and on Discord as early as Nov. 27.
Admin Blackbear responded that the request was unusual, but likely caused by a benign bug in the front-end user interface (UI).
So someone on the $BADGER discord flagged the Increase Allowance exploit on the Badger UI a few days ago. Sadly, the team brushed it aside.
The bug in the UI turned out to be the malicious attacker attempting to steal funds from that user’s withdrawal. The same tactic would be used on random users for days, or even weeks before it was discovered as a security breach.
Related:Hackers can use compromised Google Cloud accounts to install mining software in under 30 seconds: Report
At time of writing, losses from the Badger attack amounted to over $120 million, including 2078.76 BTC, 30.27 ibBTC, and 151.32 ETH, according to blockchain analytics company PeckShield. The Badger team has been investigating the issue and have paused all smart contracts on the protocol to avoid any further losses.
The mainnet launch comes just weeks after MonoX raised $5 million to disrupt traditional DEXs and eliminate inefficiencies from the DeFi ecosystem using single-sided liquidity pools.
MonoX Prepares to Launch
MonoX Protocol, the most capital-efficient automated market maker (AMM) in the DeFi space, is thrilled to announce the launch of its much-anticipated mainnet with full swap and liquidity features on Ethereum and Polygon. The mainnet is the culmination of over a year of hard work, continuous development, and testing.
Though traditional DEXs have significantly lowered the barrier for projects launching their tokens, it’s still expensive for projects to launch their tokens because they need to deposit two tokens to build the liquidity pair. MonoX’s innovative single-sided liquidity pools eliminate the need for developers to bring another asset, making it economical for projects to launch their tokens.
MonoX also provides a more capital-efficient and optimized experience to liquidity providers (LPs) and traders. The LPs have to deposit only one token to the liquidity pool, and they will receive fees for both swaps and borrowing. Traders will find that swapping tokens on MonoX is much cheaper than alternatives. The platform achieves lower trading fees by avoiding the lengthy transaction paths seen on traditional automated market makers (AMMs).
The official liquidity pools at the time of launch are:
Ethereum: ETH, WBTC, USDC, USDT
Polygon: MATIC, WBTC, USDC, USDT, WETH
MonoX plans to add more Official Pools in the coming months. However, Trustless Listing pools will be live at initial product launch. Trustless pools allow any person or project to launch their token in a permissionless manner. All you have to do is set an initial price and deposit liquidity for the token. It groups the deposited tokens into a virtual pair with its own vCASH stablecoin, which is backed by all assets in the MonoX pools.
MonoX is also a capital-efficient solution to infuse liquidity to Value-backed Tokens (VBTs) such as synthetic assets, fractional NFTs, insurance tokens, and gaming tokens. Since these assets hold inherent value, projects and users don’t need to collateralize them a second time with a liquidity pair.
Speaking on this key inflection point in the project, MonoX co-founder and CEO Ruyi Ren said:
“MonoX will be a key building block and enabler for DeFi 2.0. With our product, it’s finally possible, and easy, to make innovative projects and Value Backed Tokens (VBTs) tradable without any capital requirements or collateral.”
MonoX is the most capital-efficient automated market maker (AMM) in the DeFi ecosystem. It empowers developers, traders, and liquidity providers to participate in an open, accessible, and capital-efficient marketplace. MonoX aims to revolutionize DeFi by fixing the capital inefficiencies of the first-generation protocol models. Its single-sided liquidity pools and vCASH stablecoin facilitate lower trading fees, capital efficiency, and the ability to launch tokens with zero additional capital.
For further information, contact Hugh Flood at [email protected] or visit the website.
This news was brought to you by ANKR, our preferred DeFi Partner.
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Automated market maker (AMM) MonoX has announced the official launch of its mainnet platform, offering investors a full complement of swap and liquidity capabilities on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchain networks.
With the release of this new service, Mono X is aiming to establish a cost-effective and accessible infrastructure for liquidity providers seeking to propel their projects to the market and traders interested in engaging in token swap services.
In the case of traditional decentralized exchanges (DEXes) such as dYdX, it is necessary for projects to provide two tokens to build a liquidity pair, a requirement that increases the capital barrier for entry. With the single-sided liquidity feature, projects only need to stake their native token, which means that they can offer more overall liquidity to the market.
According to the official announcement, the liquidity pools implemented upon launch are as follows: On Ethereum, assets include Ether (ETH), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT), while on Polygon, assets include Polygon (MATIC), WBTC, USDC, USDT and Wrapped Ether (WETH).
Last month, the AMM raised $5 million in capital funding to support the decrease of mandatory capital and liquidity levels for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects offering swap, borrowing and lending derivative services on DEXes.
At the time, the project was still in beta development, but this announcement marks a transition to full-scale implementation in the DeFi space.
MonoX CEO Ruyi Ren told Cointelegraph how MonoX is utilizing single-sided liquidity pool innovation to reduce the barrier-to-entry for new DeFi participants:
“Protocols that use liquidity pairs result in capital requirements to participate in DeFi being high. With our model, all you need to do is deposit your own token to the pool (0 collateral). Project owners can list their tokens without the burden of capital requirements and focus on using funds for building the project instead of providing liquidity.”
Related: DeFi liquidity pools, explained
In addition, Ren spoke of the potential impact Value Backed Tokens could have on the wider DeFi ecosystem:
Value Backed Tokens (VBT) are tokens that are already backed by other assets. Financial derivatives, game tokens, NFT shards, DAO tokens, and even some stablecoins all fall into this category. With MonoX, we don’t require extra collateral so once a staked Ether is minted, it can be tradable on MonoX with zero capital requirement.
Automated market maker MonoX has today announced a debut capital raise of $5 million from venture firms including the likes of Axia8 Ventures, Animoca Brands, Divergence Ventures, among others.
MonoX will use the funds to support its ambitions in reducing the capital and liquidity prerequisites for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects offering swap, lending, borrowing and derivative capabilities on decentralized exchanges (DEXes).
The protocol will achieve this through the introduction of a single-sided liquidity model. Though not a revolutionary concept for liquidity pools, it will aim to support the DeFi ecosystem’s growth.
In traditional DEXes such as Uniswap, industry projects require two tokens to build a “liquidity pair,” increasing the capital barrier for entry. With the single-sided liquidity model, projects are only required to provide their native token. As such, they can offer more liquidity to the market.
Founder and CEO of MonoX, Ruyi Ren, shared his views on the potential impact of the funding:
“With a lot of innovation in the DeFi space, over-collateralization has become an increasingly big problem. We will use the funding to grow the team, further develop and build our community in new flourishing DeFi ecosystems like Solana.”
Related: Derivatives exchange dTrade raises $22.8M for market makers
Once a DeFi project contributes its native token, the MonoX-backed stablecoin vCASH steps in as the second token to form the liquidity pair. Pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, vCASH aims to reduce trading fees commonly experienced within the transactions of traditional automated market makers (AMM).
MonoX is set to launch its mainnet version on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains in Q3 2021.
Despite the vast potential of single token liquidity, this is by no means the first application of this kind within in the DeFi space.
This time last year, fellow AMM Bancor launched what it called “liquidity mining 2.0” — a single token liquidity provision designed to overcome the insidious challenges of sustaining liquidity and volume in the DeFi markets.
