Inverse Finance Hack

Reported loss $5.8M
Ethereum
Flash-loan-assisted LP-token price manipulation

What happened

On June 16, 2022, an attacker used a 27,000-WBTC Aave flash loan to manipulate the Curve 3Crypto pool used to value yvCurve-3Crypto collateral in Inverse Finance's Frontier market. The inflated collateral value enabled an oversized DOLA borrow. Inverse later reported a net DOLA loss of $5.83 million, while security analyses traced about $1.26 million of attacker proceeds after the flash loan was repaid.

This was distinct from Inverse's April 2022 INV-oracle incident.

Technical root cause

Frontier's YVCrv3CryptoFeed valued Yearn vault collateral from mutable balances in the Curve USDT-WBTC-WETH pool. A single-transaction reserve distortion therefore inflated the collateral price used in the borrowing check.

How it happened

  1. The attacker used part of the flash-borrowed WBTC to create Curve and Yearn collateral, then swapped the remaining WBTC for USDT in the Curve 3Crypto pool.
  2. That sharply changed the balances used by the yvCurve-3Crypto oracle.
  3. Frontier treated the collateral as worth far more than it was and permitted a 10.13 million DOLA borrow.
  4. The attacker unwound the Curve position, repaid Aave, and retained WBTC and USDT proceeds.

Protocol details

Classification Oracle manipulation
Protocol Type CDP
Affected asset / contract INV
Implementation language Solidity
Protocol links Website @InverseFinance

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