The Mango Hack

It’s a day ending in Y, which means we’re going to talk about crypto hacks. Yes, these are all too common - in October alone, hacks, attacks and clever exploits (more about those in a second) cost the crypto industry an estimated $700 million. Now when we talk about hacks, you might (correctly) picture sophisticated state-sponsored groups like North Korea’s Lazarus, or more run-of-the-mill attacks on Twitter or Instagram. But there's another kind of exploit that’s really raising eyebrows in crypto these days - one that involves taking advantage of how platforms are supposed to work.

One type of exploit is a price-manipulation attack - which is what happened to a DeFi platform called Mango. The person who did the exploit initially walked away with a cool $100 million.

To better understand what’s at stake for DeFi, Bloomberg reporter Muyao Shen joins this episode. Also featured is Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO and founder of Wintermute, a trading platform that was itself hacked for $160 million back in September.

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