Incident Overview
Moola Market was exploited by price manipulation for 9,100,000 USD. The benevolent hacker returned almost all the funds and took the rest as a bug bounty.
Moola Market is a decentralized liquidity protocol running on the Celo chain. The protocol was hacked by price manipulation for 9,100,000 $USD. The hacker used low liquidity on the project's $MOO token to raise the token price and used them and the $CELO coin as collateral to borrow a bigger amount of funds.
The benevolent hacker returned all the stolen funds to Moola Market's multi-sig wallet and 6,9% of the funds were returned to him as a bug bounty in 700,000 $CELO coins.
Attacker address:
https://celoscan.io/address/0x95b5579b…588efc
Bounty receiver address:
https://celoscan.io/address/0x562d82da…d1b1f2
Returning transaction:
https://celoscan.io/tx/0xc3018d2e…0d569d
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Moola Market, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to Price Oracle Attack / Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation attack class for patterns
- Audit oracle price feeds for manipulation risks - ensure time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) or multi-source aggregators are used, not spot prices
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialFunds Recovery
Recovered
$8.5M
Net Loss
627900
Security Audit History
- Audit Report 1 Report
Related Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Proof-of-Concept Exploits
On-Chain Evidence & References
Sources & References
- 01
- 02
- 03
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- 05
Learn to Prevent the Next Moola Market
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