- Tapioca DAO loses tokens to a hacker.
- One of the project's co-founders was phished, another co-founder said.
Investors in lending protocol Tapioca DAO’s TAP have been left reeling after a hacker swiped and sold millions of the token.
Starting at around 12 pm UK time on Friday, the hacker withdrew some 28 million TAP tokens from one of the protocol’s smart contracts, according to onchain data.
The hacker then swapped the stash for $1.6 million worth of Ether before converting the funds to Tether’s USDT stablecoin. They then sent the stolen funds to BNB chain via the Stargate bridge.
The hacker selling so many TAP tokens at once crashed its price from around $1.43 to just $0.05 — a 96% decline.
The hacker was able to steal the tokens by phishing pseudonymous Tapioca DAO co-founder 0xRektora, fellow co-founder Matt Marino said on the protocol’s Discord — a messaging app.
Marino said the incident started when 0xRektora was contacted about a friend being hired to another company, a situation that lowered his guard.
“Sometime during this process and timeline wise about two hours ago, 0xRektora connected his hardware wallet, which the attacker used to gain ownership of TAP,” Marino said.
Tricking victims
Phishing attacks rely on social engineering and involve tricking a victim into taking some action that benefits the attacker, such as visiting a fraudulent website or downloading malware.
“We are currently in contact with SEAL911 and Binance, and Sara. The Foundation’s counsel is contacting the authorities,” Marino said.
Tapioca DAO launched its TAP token in June. The protocol aims to let users lend and borrow crypto assets across multiple different interconnected blockchains, as well as leverage their holdings using a new stablecoin called USDO.
Tapioca isn’t the first DeFi protocol hit by a phishing attack in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, DeFi protocol Radiant Finance lost $53 million after hackers planted malware on multiple team members’ computers.
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.
