How a Pricing Mishap Led to a Multi-Million Dollar Exploit on Mirror Protocol

Estimated read time 3 min read

The Unfortunate Incident

Last Sunday, a little miscommunication turned into a big financial headache on the Mirror Protocol decentralized finance platform. A reported glitch in the pricing of synthetic assets ignited an exploit that could have siphoned off every last penny in its vaults. What started as a casual Sunday in the cryptoverse spiraled into chaos when a governance participant, identifiable as Mirroruser, took to the forum to sound the alarm.

The Numbers Don’t Add Up

By the time the dust settled, the synthetic asset pools for Mirror BTC (mBTC), Mirror Ether (mETH), Mirror Polkadot (mDOT), and some other darlings had collectively lost around $2 million worth of assets. Imagine waking up one day to find your digital wallet $2 million lighter because someone mistook a penny for a skyscraper!

How It All Went Wrong

The root of the chaos can be traced back to an erroneous price report for Luna Classic (LUNC). While LUNC was being recorded at a paltry $0.000122, its hot-shot newer sibling, Terra (LUNA), was mistakenly listed at a lofty $9.32. If that isn’t a classic case of confusion, I don’t know what is. Chainlink guru, ChainLinkGod, tossed in their two cents, explaining that the Terra Classic validators were operating on an outdated version of the oracle software. Talk about a digital disaster!

History Repeats Itself

Mirror isn’t the first decentralized protocol to dance with disaster. Its pals in the industry, Venus Protocol and Blizz Finance, were also victims of similar exploits, suffering significant losses when Chainlink’s oracle failed to maintain accurate pricing. If you’re sensing a pattern, you’re not alone. The industry needs to recognize that these oopsies aren’t just minor inconveniences—they’re potential catastrophes.

Could It Get Worse?

FatMan, the self-proclaimed crypto whistleblower, rang the alarm bell on Twitter, indicating that Mirror’s mishap could inflict collateral damage on additional m-asset pools. Yet he held a glimmer of hope stating that a swift intervention by the developers might save the day. Time was of the essence—and thankfully, by the crack of dawn the next day, the price debacle had been addressed, restoring sanity to the system.

A Bumpy Road Ahead

Notorious for its vulnerability, the Mirror Protocol has seen its code exploited more often than a bad sitcom gets canceled. A previous exploit in 2021 allowed users to withdraw each other’s collateral, resulting in a staggering loss of over $30 million. It’s like a never-ending rerun that nobody asked for!

The Bigger Picture

As the Terra ecosystem relaunched its do-over, dubbed Terra 2.0, the situation drew attention to the pressing need for resilience and risk management within DeFi. Investors are getting airdrops from the old Terra, navigating through this wild landscape of decentralized assets. The Mirror Protocol (MIR) token is now sliding down by about 2% to trade at approximately $0.31. Much like the rollercoaster of emotions that accompanies watching the stock market, the crypto community has to brace themselves for any more curveballs that might come their way.

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