Crypto tracking platform DappRadar shuts down, citing financial woes

Amid a month of falling crypto prices, the crypto tracking platform DappRadar has announced it will be shutting down after seven years of operation. "Running a platform of this scale became financially unsustainable in the current environment," the company announced on Twitter.

The company had previously raised several rounds of financing, with a $2.3 million seed round in 2019 and a $5 million Series A in 2021.

Cardano holder loses $6 million to slippage

A holder of around 14.4 million ADA (~$6.9 million), the token for the Cardano network, made an expensive error when attempting to swap the tokens for a stablecoin. Because the stablecoin they were looking to buy is lightly used and has only around $10.6 million tokens in circulation, an attempt to purchase millions of the tokens on the market caused the dollar-pegged stablecoin's price to spike to around $1.26. The resulting slippage meant that the trader spent their roughly $6.9 million in tokens to receive a little less than $850,000 in the USDA stablecoin, meaning the trader essentially threw away $6 million.

Observers have questioned what happened. It's possible that the holder, who had not been active on-chain since 2020, was simply unaware of the slippage risk. It's also possible that it was a "fat-finger" trade — that the trader accidentally selected the wrong stablecoin from a list of similarly named options, some of which could have more easily absorbed a trade of that size.

Elixir shuts down deUSD after Stream Finance halt

After the defi yield platform Stream Finance announced a $93 million loss, Elixir announced it would be discontinuing its deUSD synthetic stablecoin. Stream Finance owes $68 million to Elixir, and holds around $75 million deUSD.

Elixir has announced that they plan to allow deUSD holders to redeem their tokens for USDC through a process that will also eliminate the risk of Stream Finance cashing out their deUSD without repaying their loan. According to Elixir, "Stream comprised of 99%+ of the lending positions (and has decided to not repay or close positions)".

Moonwell accrues almost $3.7 million of bad debt after oracle malfunction

The Moonwell lending protocol, built on the Base Ethereum L2, wound up with $3.7 million in bad debt after an attacker took advantage of an oracle malfunction that caused the price of wrsETH to be massively inflated. The Chainlink oracle used by the project erroneously reported that a single wrsETH token (Kelp DAO's wrapped restaked ETH) was priced at around 1.65 million ETH (~$5.8 billion). Within 30 seconds of the oracle reporting bad data, an attacker took advantage of the error to borrow huge amounts of tokens, which they then swapped to other tokens to cash out.

Ultimately the attacker profited around 295 ETH (~$1 million), but the protocol was saddled with significantly more bad debt that the team will now have to grapple with.

Stream Finance halts activity after $93 million loss

The Stream Finance defi yield project announced that "an external fund manager overseeing Stream funds disclosed the loss of approximately $93 million in Stream fund assets." Stream announced that they were in the process of withdrawing remaining liquid assets, and had halted all deposits or withdrawals. They also announced they had retained a law firm to investigate the "incident".

The project didn't disclose who the fund manager was, or the circumstances in which the "loss" occurred.

The Staked Stream USD token depegged on November 3, and crashed further following the announcement.

Balancer exploited for at least $110 million

The defi protocol Balancer suffered a major exploit that drained over $110 million across several blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Base, and Sonic. Attackers exploited faulty access control in the manageUserBalance function of Balancer's v2 smart contract, enabling unauthorized internal withdrawals. The stolen tokens included 6,850 osETH, 6,590 wETH, and 4,260 wstETH, later consolidated into new wallets likely for laundering.

The exploit also impacted forked protocols like Beets Finance, which lost around $3 million. Balancer's BAL token dropped over 10% following the theft.

This was Balancer's third major security incident since 2020, despite prior audits by OpenZeppelin and Trail of Bits.

Garden hacked for $11 million

The Garden bitcoin bridge suffered a roughly $11 million loss after one of its solvers was compromised. These solvers essentially act as market makers for the protocol. Some blockchain sleuths have questioned whether the affected solver, which Garden described as a separate entity, may actually be operated by the same team as Garden.

There wasn't much sympathy to be had for Garden after this exploit. The protocol had recently announced hitting a milestone of bridging more than $2 billion in assets, but the celebration was criticized after zachxbt pointed out that a substantial portion of the bridged funds were proceeds of crimes being laundered to evade detection and recovery.