What happened
New Free DAO's rewards contract credited excessive rewards to an attacker using flash-loaned token balances. The attacker sold the resulting NFD rewards for WBNB, repaid the loans and retained the proceeds.
Technical root cause
The unverified reward contract used current token balance and elapsed time to calculate rewards. Its start-time initialization gave a newly funded position non-zero reward time, allowing a temporary flash-loaned balance to earn rewards that were not supported by a corresponding holding period.
How it happened
- The attacker established membership through an attacker-controlled contract.
- Flash-borrowed WBNB was swapped for NFD and passed into the project's reward flow.
- The reward calculation combined the temporary token balance with an already non-zero elapsed-time value.
- The attacker repeated the process and sold the excess NFD rewards.
Protocol details
Classification
Other / Protocol Logic
Protocol Type
Exploit/Flash Loan Attack
Affected asset / contract
NFD
Implementation language
Solidity
Evidence
- report Report beincrypto.com
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis New Free Dao Incident Analysis certik.com
Understand the attack patterns
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