After Mango Markets exploit, Compound pauses 4 tokens to guard towards worth manipulation

by Jeremy

Decentralized lending protocol Compound has paused the availability of 4 tokens as lending collateral on its platform, aiming to guard customers towards potential assaults involving worth manipulation, just like the current $117 million exploit of Mango Markets, in response to a proposal on Compound’s governance discussion board that was just lately handed.

With the pause, customers won’t be able to deposit Yearn.finance’s YFI (YFI), 0x’s ZRX, Fundamental Consideration Token (BAT) and Maker’s MKR (MKR) as collateral to take loans.

The proposal handed on Oct. 25 with 99% of all voters in favor. It said:

“An oracle manipulation-based assault analogous to the one which value Mango Markets $117m is far much less prone to happen on Compound because of collateral belongings having a lot deeper liquidity than MNGO and Compound requiring loans to be over-collateralized. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of warning, we suggest pausing provide for the above belongings, given their relative liquidity profiles.”

In a safety overview of Compound v2 carried out in September, the Volt Protocol crew recognized potential market manipulation dangers associated to low-liquidity tokens. The report defined: 

“The assault is feasible when the quantity of a token borrowable on markets like Aave and Compound is giant in comparison with the liquid market. Essentially the most notable instance is ZRX, which has borrowable liquidity on every of those markets similar to or larger than the standard every day quantity throughout all centralized and decentralized exchanges.”

On Twitter, Robert Leshner, founding father of Compound, defined that the conservative method wouldn’t influence present customers. 

On Oct. 11, Avraham Eisenberg, the hacker behind the Mango Markets exploit, manipulated the worth of a posted collateral — the platforms’ native token, MNGO — to increased costs, then took out important loans towards the inflated collateral, which drained Mango’s treasury.

The exploiter, self-described as a digital artwork vendor on Twitter, claimed that he and a crew of hackers undertook a “extremely worthwhile buying and selling technique” and that it was “authorized open market actions, utilizing the protocol as designed.”

After a proposal within the Mango’s governance discussion board was permitted, Eisenberg was allowed to maintain $47 million as a “bug bounty” whereas $67 million was despatched again to the treasury.