Ankr invests $15M to make users whole, Helio stablecoin recovers from exploit

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Helio protocol had a total locked value of approximately. $90 million prior to the incident. News Collect this article as NFT. According to a Dec. 7 Twitter post, stablecoin protocol Helio (which issues the HAY stablecoin pegged to the U.S. Dollar), the firm had purchased back $3 million in bad debt in HAY so far in the open markets. Ankr, a blockchain infrastructure platform, stated that it would allocate $15million to purchase back bad debt due to its recent exploit and the subsequent over-circulation HAY. A hacker exploited vulnerabilities in Ankr’s smart contract code and compromised private key after a technical upgrade. This led to a series of seemingly unrelated events on Dec. 2. The hacker created 20 trillion Ankr Rewards Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc), tokens that were pegged to the BNB token (BNB) and then used them to borrow 16 million HAY. This was in addition to a technical upgrade that had allowed for the hacker to access private keys and manipulate vulnerabilities in the smart contract code of Ankr. The trader purchased 183,885 BNBc with only 10BNB and used it to secure 16 million HAY. This was a 5,209x profit compared to their original capital.
HAY lost its peg following the exploit. It fell to $0.20 per coin, before recovering most of its losses. HAY is currently trading at $0.96 as of the time of publication. The Helio team immediately stated that it would be repurchasing excess HAY and sending the money to a burn address. Initially, users could mint HAY by depositing BNB in collateral at a ratio 152%. Before the incident, the protocol had a total value of approximately $90 million.