• Hacker made off with $200 million in a flash loan attack on PancakeBunny.
• PancakeBunny team explained that the hack was caused by an outside exploiter.

Binance Smart Chain (BSC) exchange PancakeBunny has lost about $200 million in an attack amid the ongoing wave of flash loan exploits affecting the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry. The attacker stole the funds after influencing the price of BUNNY. Specifically, PancakeBunny lost BUNNY and BNB in the attack. The hacker ran off with 700,000 tokens of BUNNY and 114,000 BNB. Speaking on the flash loan attack, theDEX said it was caused by an “outside exploiter.”

PancakeBunny commented on the attack in a tweet posted on the 20th of May. The team said:

Attention Bunny Fam. We would like to remind the community that no vaults have been compromised. The exploit was an economic exploit that attacked the price of Bunny, using flash loans. We repeat, no vaults have been breached.

PancakeBunny speaks on flash loan attack 

The PancakeBunny team revealed that the attacker borrowed a huge amount of BNB using PancakeSwap. After that, the prices of USDT/BNB and BUNNY/BNB were manipulated. As stated by the team, the hacker accrued a lot of BUNNY from the flash loan sales and then dumped all the tokens back in the market. This action led to a crash, causing the value of BUNNY to decline significantly. In a Twitter thread, the PancakeBunny team explained that its developers are working on enabling withdrawals.

The team added that the process is now in the testing stage and should be completed in a few hours. Initially, PancakeBunny said that it has temporarily frozen all withdrawals and deposits until it was safe to do so. With the latest update from the team, anyone can now withdraw their BUNNY tokens. However, BUNNY withdrawal will not attract the regular payment of a 30 percent performance fee. This is because the PancakeBunny team has disabled the minting function to aid the withdrawal process. 

The PancakeBunny flash loan attack is not the first of its kind in the DeFi space. On the 16th of May, DeFi protocol bEarn lost $11 million in stablecoins. The attacker stole more than $10.8 million worth of BUSD. According to the protocol, the attack resulted from improper implementation of the withdrawal function. 

After the attacker, bEarn asked that Binance block the hacker’s address to prevent further losses. Similar to PancakeBunny, bEarn also promised to work on a compensation plan. The DeFi platform said it would compensate users with 87.5 percent of their deposits in BUSD. Users would also receive an additional 7.5 percent in bDollar tokens. 

BUNNY and BNB price performances

At the time of writing, BUNNY is down nearly 80 percent to $36. The token has dropped from a high of $170 to $31 in the last 24 hours. With the market crash, BUNNY also shed 20 percent in its 24-hour trading volume. The tokens market cap has also corrected about 78 percent to roughly $18 million. 

BNB has lost 14 percent in the last 24 hours and currently trades at $360.