After losing $8.4 million in an exploitation attempt last month, Bunni, a Decentralized exchange, decided to terminate its operations indefinitely. The team declared that the mishap left the project in a financial situation where it was unable to fund a safe relaunch or further development.
In their post on X (formerly Twitter), the Bunni team wrote that the hack stopped the team’s growth and depleted the resources that would have been needed for recovery. “The recent exploit has forced Bunni’s growth to a standstill, and to be able to relaunch securely we would need to pay for audit and monitoring costs alone (six to seven figures) — hence the capital requirement that we simply do not have,” they explained.
The payload in the last months led to the loss of around $8.4 million of users’ assets. The post-mortem report detailed that the perpetrator exploited a rounding error in the withdrawal section of the smart contract to take the funds. As per Bunni, the assets that were taken have been laundered via Tornado Cash, thus making the recovery operations more complex.
Bunni revealed that it is working closely with the police to find the perpetrator and recover the stolen money. The team is also giving the hacker a 10% bounty if they return the rest of the stolen assets. The event highlights the issue of decentralized protocols being continually susceptible to technical exploits despite being regularly audited and having preventive measures in place.
Users must be aware that Bunni has closed down its operations but the exchange’s website will still be available for them to withdraw their assets until further notice. In their statement, the team mentioned that they will share the leftover treasury assets with the holders of BUNNI, LIT, and veBUNNI tokens according to the pre-hack snapshot after confirmation from the legal team. They have also informed that team members will not be included in the distribution.
Furthermore, Bunni has changed the license of its V2 smart contracts from the Business Source License to the more permissive MIT license. With this decision, other developers are free to incorporate this technology, among other things, liquidity distribution features, surge fees, and automated rebalancing tools, in their next decentralized finance projects.
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