Binance Smart Chain's Spartan Protocol Loses $30M+ in Exploit

The attack happened just a few days after another DeFi protocol was attacked on Binance Smart Chain.

AccessTimeIconMay 2, 2021 at 4:04 p.m. UTC
Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 12:49 p.m. UTC
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Spartan Protocol, a decentralized protocol built on Binance Smart Chain for incentivized liquidity and synthetic assets, was exploited earlier Sunday UTC due to "a flawed liquidity share calculation" in the protocol, resulting in a loss of more than $30 million, according to a Medium post by on-chain analysis and security startup PeckShield.

  • "In particular, the specific hack inflates the asset balance of the pool before burning the same amount of pool tokens to claim an unnecessarily large amount of underlying assets," the post read.
  • "What we know so far – attacker used $61 million in BNB to overcome the pools via a[n] as yet unknown economic exploit path to remove roughly $3 million in funds from the pools," according to the official Twitter account of Spartan Protocol, which first reported the incident around 12:21 a.m. UTC on May 2.
  • According to Spartan Protocol's official website, the decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity platform "provides community-governed and programmable token emissions functions to incentivize the formation of deep liquidity pools."
  • The attack came just a few days after Binance Smart Chain's DeFi exchange Uranium Finance lost more than $50 million in an exploit on April 28 from a similar attack.
  • The attack on Spartan Protocol makes it the sixth-biggest monetary exploit in DeFi history, according to Rekt, after EasyFi's $59 million, Uranium Finance's $57.2 million, Kucoin's $45 million, Alpha Finance's $37.5 million and Meerkat Finance's $32 million.

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