🚨 Kava Lend Attacked - 55.2M KAVA Drained
Kava Lend, the native lending protocol on Kava Chain, was exploited on Nov 14.
🐾 What happened:
Attacker targeted the dormant BUSD market - a market almost empty since Paxos stopped minting BUSD in 2023.
By using a small BUSD loan, attacker pushed the market's net supply down to almost zero ($0.00000002). Kava Lend's code only checked for exactly zero, so it divided interest by that tiny number.
Result: BUSD deposit value inflated ∼243,000x in 3 minutes - counted as ∼$1.25B in collateral.
Attacker then borrowed KAVA 127 times using a second account to liquidate each loan and bypass the borrowing cap.
🐾 Damage:
- 55.2M KAVA borrowed - pool went from 55.33M KAVA to just 0.19 KAVA in ∼90 mins
- Worth ∼$3.76M at pre-attack price of $0.068
- ∼49.2M KAVA bridged to BNB Chain via LayerZero and sold for ∼$2.09M (3,006 BNB + 231,557 USDT)
- $KAVA crashed ∼39% to ∼$0.042 in 24h cb61
🐾 Kava's response:
Team said "This is not an infinite mint. The event is isolated and contained within Kava Lend." They paused Axelar bridge and partner exchanges paused deposits/withdrawals as precaution. Full post-mortem still pending.
🐾 Lesson: The biggest risk in DeFi is not always a hack - it's old, dormant markets with broken math that nobody audits again.
Don't keep funds in dead markets. Always check protocol risk.
#KAVA $KAVA #DeFi #cryptohacks
Kava Lend, the native lending protocol on Kava Chain, was exploited on Nov 14.
🐾 What happened:
Attacker targeted the dormant BUSD market - a market almost empty since Paxos stopped minting BUSD in 2023.
By using a small BUSD loan, attacker pushed the market's net supply down to almost zero ($0.00000002). Kava Lend's code only checked for exactly zero, so it divided interest by that tiny number.
Result: BUSD deposit value inflated ∼243,000x in 3 minutes - counted as ∼$1.25B in collateral.
Attacker then borrowed KAVA 127 times using a second account to liquidate each loan and bypass the borrowing cap.
🐾 Damage:
- 55.2M KAVA borrowed - pool went from 55.33M KAVA to just 0.19 KAVA in ∼90 mins
- Worth ∼$3.76M at pre-attack price of $0.068
- ∼49.2M KAVA bridged to BNB Chain via LayerZero and sold for ∼$2.09M (3,006 BNB + 231,557 USDT)
- $KAVA crashed ∼39% to ∼$0.042 in 24h cb61
🐾 Kava's response:
Team said "This is not an infinite mint. The event is isolated and contained within Kava Lend." They paused Axelar bridge and partner exchanges paused deposits/withdrawals as precaution. Full post-mortem still pending.
🐾 Lesson: The biggest risk in DeFi is not always a hack - it's old, dormant markets with broken math that nobody audits again.
Don't keep funds in dead markets. Always check protocol risk.
#KAVA $KAVA #DeFi #cryptohacks
