Luna Cryptocurrency's Collapse Led to Multi-Million-Dollar Exploits, Closure of a Crypto Money Market

The Record reports that the decentralized money market Venus Protocol 'announced on Thursday evening about $11 million had been lost due to people exploiting the historic collapse of the Luna cryptocurrency and its sister stablecoin UST.'
Venus Protocol and several other platforms use Chainlink to provide its users with real-time price estimations of the tokens on its platform that are available for lending and borrowing. But the tool began having issues with Luna on Thursday as the price continued to fall precipitously. 'As a result, it was possible to deposit UST and LUNA as collateral and borrow other tokens, with an underpriced collateral valuation....' decentralized finance researcher Vali Dyor explained.
Venus Protocol says they became 'aware of errant price behavior for LUNA,' and 'Upon investigation, it was learned that the price feed had been paused by Chainlink due to extreme market conditions.'

'The price on Venus was last listed at about $0.107 while the market price was $0.01. In order to de-risk this situation, the protocol was paused using PauseGuardian via multisig. Upon this desyncing event, it was discovered that 2 accounts had suspiciously deposited a sum of 230,000,000 LUNA valued at over $24,000,000. Assets were borrowed totalling around $13,500,000.'

Venus Protocol has a 'Risk Fund' that will be used to cover the shortfall, the Record reports. But they added that Venus Protocol wasn't the only one having problems:

As the price of Luna cratered overnight, exchanges and markets were forced to make difficult choices on how to approach the cryptocurrency. Binance stopped all trading of Luna and UST on its platform but the moves have done little to stop all cryptocurrency values from being depressed across the board.

DeFi platform Blizz Finance announced that it was attacked in the same way Venus Protocol was, but they did not release an estimate on the losses incurred. But they said the protocol was 'drained' before it could stop the process.

And then Blizz Finance posted a post-mortem early Sunday morning:

Large amounts of LUNA were deposited and used to drain all available lendable assets... Prior to the incident the Chainlink team did attempt to notify us that the oracle would pause, however we did not receive the message in time. We were unaware of Chainlink's minimum price circuit breaker. This behaviour is not mentioned anywhere within Chainlink's documentation...

Blizz has no treasury or development fund and a significant portion of the stolen assets belonged to our team. As such we regret to announce the protocol has been paused and we do not intend to resume operations. We will be shutting down the front-end and closing official communication channels in the coming days....

We are very sorry for the losses incurred by our users. We thank the community for their support on this journey and deeply regret that this is how it came to an end.

They posted one additional detail on Twitter. 'We are reaching out to a Chinese community who is believed to have doxxed individuals who participated in the attacks.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.