Celo Blockchain-Based Moola Market Loses $8.5 Million In Hacking Incident

Moola Market, a decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform, has been hacked and the attacker has reportedly made away with close to $8.5 million.

The platform's development team confirmed the exploit in a Twitter post, urging users to not trade any mtokens. All activities on the open-source protocol for decentralized money markets were paused temporarily.

"To the exploiter, we have contacted law enforcement and taken steps to make it difficult to liquidate the funds. We are willing to negotiate a bounty payment in exchange for returning the funds within the next 24 hours," announced Moola Market.

Igor Igamberdiev, a researcher for The Block, first broke the news about the hacking attack on Moola Market, which is responsible for providing non-custodial liquidity protocol on the Celo blockchain.

The hacker followed a fairly simple and quite common method to attack Moola Market. They first purchased 243,000 CELO from Binance, the world's leading crypto exchange, then lent 60,000 CELO to Moola and borrowed 1.8 million of Moola's native MOO tokens. The last step was to pump the price of MOO and borrow them using the remaining CELO tokens.

The attacker was able to make away with 1.8 million MOO tokens ($655,000), 8 million CELO ($6.5 million), 765,000 cEUR ($750,000) and 644,000 cUSD ($639,000).

The attack on Moola Markets happened just around the same time when BitKeep Wallet, a prominent digital asset wallet in Asia, was exploited for close to $1 million, blockchain security and data analytics company PeckShield reported.

"BitKeep will launch a compensation portal within 3 working days for all victims to apply for refund. BitKeep will compensate 100% of your stolen assets," said the platform in a Twitter post.