Shortly after the attack took place, the Meerkat Finance website and Twitter account were deleted.

Many believe that the Meerkat Finance attack was a rug-pull/exit scam, an attack in which the creator of the project or the project’s team members drain the funds to their own wallets. The exploit took place just one day after Meerkat Finance launched. On March 4th, Meerkat Finance, a DeFi project launched on the Binance Smart Chain, was the victim of an exploit that drained $31 million from the project. These aren’t the first DeFi exploits of 2021, however, they are unlikely to be the last.

This time around, we are seeing DeFi projects on emerging platforms like the Binance Smart Chain become the victim of hacks, exploits, and security breaches. Hire fast and fire faster at its best.Three major DeFi exploits have taken place within the last week. This pulled in an incredible amount of money as DeFi investors chased new fresh yields in a potentially massive new exchange.Īs for retail investors, the lesson is that one should not get married to your investments in DeFi because capital is often mercenary and looking for the best yields. In February, Sestagalli launched Solidly, a B2B stablecoin exchange that he developed in cooperation with the highly respected DeFi builder Andre Cronje. Its main pull has been Daniele Sestagalli, a flamboyant and wildly popular DeFi developer that built Abracadabra Finance (a lending protocol and algorithmic stablecoin), and Wonderland (a well-designed Ponzi scheme). Mainly, money is flowing into its Anchor, Mirror, and Astroport protocols, which allow investors to profit from juicy yields on its UST stablecoin.įantom is a similar success story, with its TVl hovering around similar values as Terra’s. terra already accounts for 11% of DeFi TVL, growing its sare from practically zero a year ago. That is the case for Fantom and Terra, two alternative L1s that have seen the bulk of TVL growth in 2022. The rise of Fantom and TerraĭeFi money is rarely gone. Although Solana is fixing these issues, crypto money has little loyalty and investors have already found new darlings. Several network outages laid bare how centralised Solana really is and that its speed comes at a certain cost. However, the problems started before that. Similar to BNB Chain, Solana suffered a major hack when its Wormhole bridge was exploited for $322 million ($441 million AUD). Propelled by its impressive performance, Solana catapulted to record valuations and an all-time high in TVL of over $20 billion AUD in December 2021. Although it still boasts several respectable exchanges and applications in PancakeSwap, Venus, Alpaca, and Ellipsis Finance, BNB Chain is not the go-to alternative layer-one it used to be a year ago.Ī similar fate befell Solana, the second big breakout star after BNB Chain. It has lost 60% of its value since.Īnalysts see BNB Chain’s centralization, constant security issues, and lack of innovation as the biggest problems plaguing Binance’s in-house blockchain. In 2021, BNB Chain exploded in value, from virtually zero to a peak of $42.5 billion AUD. Why BNB Chain and Solana are strugglingīNB Chain, the former Binance Smart Chain, was the first big alternative layer-one chain that gained traction at the end of DeFi summer 2020. But BNB Chain and Solana have been hit the hardest. Ethereum is down 30% from its TVL all-time high and has lost a good amount of market share (down to 65% of all DeFi TVL). Currently, $288 billion AUD is locked as total value across different DeFi protocols, down from the December peak of $350 billion AUD. No matter how you look at it, DeFi has seen better days.

Defi coins on binance