Hacker nabs $15m from an unreleased Yearn Finance project

September 29, 2020
By Sam Grant

Another incident involving theft of funds in the decentralised finance space leads to a $15m haul for hacker

The project called Eminence (EMN) is being delivered by Yearn’s Andre Cronje suffered a $15 million loss yesterday. The loss has been viewed by critics as a consequence of the DeFi community’s voracity for unaudited code.

The project leader, Andre Cronje, posted teasers of the project on Twitter before retiring to bed yesterday. It wasn’t long before the community ‘FOMOed’ (fear of missing out) about $15 million into the protocol, however, what followed was an unfortunate draining of the protocol. Strangely, the perpetrator decided to send $8 million to Cronje’s account.

“Yesterday we finished the concept behind our new economy for a gaming multiverse (Eminence)…I deployed 2 separate batches of contract. We posted the first clan ‘Spartans’ and I went to bed,” Andre posted.

“I was messaged awake to find out a) almost $15 million was deposited into the contracts b) the contracts were exploited for the full $15 million and c) $8 million was sent to my yearn: deployer account.”

He described the exploit as a basic one saying, “The exploit itself was a very simple one, mint a lot of EMN at the tight curve, burn the EMN for one of the other currency, sell the currency for EMN”

Andre also revealed that Eminence was not ready to be released, adding that the contracts and ecosystem were not yet complete. In a tweet from the same thread, he said, “Eminence is at least 3 + weeks away.” He also announced that Yearn’s treasury will help reimburse users back the $8 million he received.