BonqDAO and AllianceBlock hit by $89 million hack

An unknown actor siphoned roughly 114 million AllianceBlock (ALBT) tokens and 98 million BEUR from the BonqDAO protocol pool.

seems that @BonqDAO and @allianceblock has been exploited and large amounts of BEUR and ALBT tokens tokens have been stolen. hacker so far has managed to get 500k USDC from dumping BEUR. He still has 98m BEUR and $12m worth of ALBT. pic.twitter.com/2NPAyXIpGQ

— Spreek (@spreekaway) February 1, 2023

Due to the assets’ low liquidity, the hacker was only able to partially convert them into Ethereum and DAI for about $1.7 million. In total, the attacker’s wallet holds coins worth about $89.8 million.

AllianceBlock said the incident did not affect other BonqDAO pools or the project’s ‘treasuries’, as they are called in the project. The attacker exploited price-oracle manipulation in a smart contract that allows BEUR to be issued collateralized by ALBT.

Both teams are working with partners to remove liquidity from the market and halt trading of the coins on exchanges.

AllianceBlock developers also halted the cross-chain bridge until the situation is resolved. The protocol team said it had taken a snapshot to issue tokens to compensate users.

ANNOUNCEMENT

There has been a recent incident involving several ALBT Troves on Bonq, with the attacker gaining access to around 110M ALBT.

The incident is isolated to these Troves. None of our smart contracts was breached or compromised. pic.twitter.com/puntkIPK3G

— AllianceBlock (@allianceblock) February 1, 2023

Following the incident, ALBT’s price briefly fell about 75%. After recovering, the token trades around $0.046, about 59% below its pre-hack level (CoinGecko).

The euro-pegged BEUR shed around 22% in a day. At the time of writing, the asset trades at about $0.86.

As reported by HAPI Labs, the total crypto-industry loss in 2022 from 359 incidents, including hacks and bankruptcies, reached $63.9 billion.