Ankr Exploit Causes Collateral Damage

“We were able to minimize any damage,” Ankr team says, but Helio Protocol customers may disagree

article-image

Source: DALL-E

share

Decentralized Web3 infrastructure provider Ankr sought to reassure its community Friday with an initial response to the theft of at least $5.5 million from BNB Chain liquidity pools and money markets. 

The team confirmed that Ankr’s other products — including validators, RPC nodes, and AppChain services — were not affected. That will come as a relief to holders of Ankr’s other larger staking derivatives, notably aETHc — Ankr staked ether — which carries a market cap of about $68 million.

Loading Tweet..

The attacker minted a total of 60 trillion aBNBc across 6 different transactions. The thief then used the minted, but unbacked tokens to drain liquidity from decentralized exchanges on the BNB Chain. After turning around and buying the depressed aBNBc the attacker was able to raid borrowing and lending protocol Helio by withdrawing $16 million in HAY, the protocol’s custom stablecoin and swapping it for $15.5 million BUSD, the Binance stablecoin issued by Paxos.

Prior to the exploit, Helio had $90 million in Total Value Locked, according to DeFiLlama.

Loading Tweet..

“Hacks and exploits from bad actors like this are an unfortunate possibility in Web3, even with every attention to detail in security processes — but we were well prepared,” Co-Founder & CEO Chandler Song, said in a statement.

A recommended “action plan” explained how users of aBNBc can be compensated through a new ankrBNB token that will be minted and airdropped based on a pre-exploit snapshot of on-chain data.

While the attack apparently stems from malicious use of the private key for the aBNBc smart contract deployer, it’s unclear exactly how the key was compromised. Industry best practices call for multisignature wallets and timelocks on upgradeable smart contracts, to prevent this type of attack.

Representatives from Ankr did not respond to Blockworks request for comment.

Other providers of liquid staked BNB such as pSTAKE use multisigs to protect sensitive contracts, and restrict access to token minting functions, while fully decentralized dapps such as Uniswap on Ethereum are not upgradeable at all.

The full extent of the collateral damage is not yet clear, but the Ankr team expressed the intent to resolve losses incurred by customers of related DeFi dapps.

For example, Ankr will cover bad debt incurred by Helio Protocol, pending the outcome of ongoing discussions, according to the latter’s official Twitter account.


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Research Report Templates (15).png

Research

A spot listing on Binance can support highly favorable short term returns. Tokens that TGE on Binance exhibit lower short term returns when compared to tokens that receive the listing after TGE. Both spot and futures listings support higher returns, while a spot listing is historically more favorable. Tokens that have yet to receive a Binance spot listing may be trading at a 30-50% discount to their market value upon receiving a Binance spot listing.

article-image

Stablecoins have emerged as crypto’s killer app, and the data shows that they still have room to run

article-image

Sponsored

Unmatched security, unparalleled performance, unwavering commitment

article-image

Coinbase Institutional’s David Duong looked at how crypto performed in January and explains where crypto’s growing

article-image

SOL could see sell pressure from locked FTX tokens and Grayscale Trust shares

article-image

The 12 points are nothing new, but they may be helpful to lawmakers and regulators needing a refresher on priorities

article-image

About 70% of those surveyed believe crypto supervisory scrutiny remains just as intense