Incident Overview
Nirvana Finance became the victim of a flash loan attack during which the liquidity pools of the protocol were depleted. The Solana-based Nirvana protocol suffered losses of $3.5M.
Nirvana is a sustainable mechanism of wealth creation due to the growing minimum price. The $ANA and $NIRV token functioned as a balance between profitability and risk.
Nirvana Finance has been subjected to a flash loan attack on the Solana network. The attacker took a flash loan during which he managed to manipulate the price and change the value of $ANA from $8 to $24.27 per transaction. Using the Solend Protocol , the attacker borrowed 10M $USDC which were used for exploiting Nirvana. He minted $ANA in worth of 10M $USDC then swapped $ANA for $USDT taking a profit of $3.5M which then were bridged through the Wormhole Bridge into the Ethereum network. At the moment of this writing all the stolen funds are sitting on the attacker's account.
Involved addresses:
Scammer addresses:
(ETH) https://etherscan.io/address/0xb9ae2624…e67c09
(Sol) https://solscan.io/account/62o4UiW394cbFXtVHbCyuA7DDeRL26bnpfDDPXpm7PRR
(Sol) https://solscan.io/account/76w4SBe2of2wWUsx2FjkkwD29rRznfvEkBa1upSbTAWH
Nirvana Treasury address (Sol): https://solscan.io/account/CxuuSEv67PzNkMxqCvHeDUr6HKaadoz8NhTfxbQSJnaG
Transactions:
Flash-loan: https://solscan.io/tx/LyUnvdY9KBQiVRFqmSzGUfCuPGqYX1xNHCWLWxWZ4MvgLcNis2Kui6T25Ayai5UzpTAFkSRSgriKb3pM8tAoeR5
Bridging tokens through the Wormhole:
1) https://etherscan.io/tx/0xb5a89c01…76339c
2) https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4ed27184…dee49e
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
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 Nirvana Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (July 2022).
- Verify all logic paths related to Flash Loan Attack are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Flash Loans Attacks attack class for patterns
- 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 TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
- 05
- 06
Learn to Prevent the Next Nirvana Finance
The Nirvana Finance hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.