DeFi Platform Mango Allowed Hacker to Leave $50 Million

The community of DeFi trading platform Mango Markets has voted in favour of a settlement with the hacker. He will return $69 million and keep the remaining $47 million as a reward. Last week, he managed to steal $116 million.

The community of token holders voted to allow the hacker to keep about $47 million for the return of the rest, while promising not to prosecute him and erasing the bad debts.

Previously, shortly after the theft, the hacker had posted a proposal on the app's management forum to write off bad debts on the platform, but it was not approved by the Mango community even after the hacker voted for it with some of the stolen tokens.

We just got notice of the funds being returned,

Maximilian Schneider of Mango said in a Discord message to Bloomberg on Saturday.

Community members will discuss how to return the $67 million to users, and a vote on the plans will take place next week.

The identity of the hacker is unknown but there have been posts on Twitter in which one person has claimed responsibility for the hack. He said he was “involved with a team that operated a highly profitable trading strategy last week” on Mango last week.

I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they are,

according to the account who claims to be Avraham Eisenberg.

The hacker managed to carry out the theft via two accounts funded with a stable USD Coin. He took large positions in perpetual Mango futures, which caused the price of the Mango token to spike, thereby causing unrealised profits from the futures. He used these profits to borrow and withdraw about $100 million.

DeFi Llama believes the hacker stole more than 10% of the entire value locked in on the Solana blockchain, on which Mango is based.

However, the amount of hacking profits the hacker will make is not known, as the attacker spent millions to execute his plan.

This payout could be considered one of the largest in the hacker's history. PolyNetwork had previously been hacked resulting in a $610 million withdrawal from the platform by the attacker, but he recovered the funds after being offered a job and a reward for recovering the funds.