SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the a-few-bugs-still-need-ironing-out dept.
Really stupid "smart contract" bug let hackers steal $31 million in digital coin:
Blockchain startup MonoX Finance said on Wednesday that a hacker stole $31 million by exploiting a bug in software the service uses to draft smart contracts.
The company uses a decentralized finance protocol known as MonoX that lets users trade digital currency tokens without some of the requirements of traditional exchanges. "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," MonoX company representatives say here. "It works by grouping deposited tokens into a virtual pair with vCASH, to offer a single token pool design."
An accounting error built into the company's software let an attacker inflate the price of the MONO token and to then use it to cash out all the other deposited tokens, MonoX Finance revealed in a post. The haul amounted to $31 million worth of tokens on the Ethereum or Polygon blockchains, both of which are supported by the MonoX protocol.
Specifically, the hack used the same token as both the tokenIn and tokenOut, which are methods for exchanging the value of one token for another. MonoX updates prices after each swap by calculating new prices for both tokens. When the swap is completed, the price of tokenIn—that is, the token sent by the user—decreases and the price of tokenOut—or the token received by the user—increases.
By using the same token for both tokenIn and tokenOut, the hacker greatly inflated the price of the MONO token because the updating of the tokenOut overwrote the price update of the tokenIn. The hacker then exchanged the token for $31 million worth of tokens on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @02:33AM (1 child)
Just to be clear - your reasoning is expressing that you're not impressed with currency at all.
Which I agree with on most levels, but at the same time, it *has* lubricated some (business) aspects of society quite a bit, to the benefit of ... some.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday December 03 2021, @03:55AM
Crypto fulfills none of the roles of currency:
- It isn't operating as a medium of exchange, because most people don't accept it for most transactions.
- It isn't operating as a store of value, because its exchange value for both other currencies and real goods fluctuates by far too much.
- Because of the last two points, it isn't operating as a measurement of value, because again the price in those currencies changes too fast for all goods and services.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.