A vulnerability in Ankr’s ankrFLOW liquid staking contract let an attacker mint roughly 8.6 million unbacked tokens on Monday. The attacker posted them as collateral on MORE Markets and drained about $410,000.
Security firm Blockaid first put the detector impact at $9.3 million and named MORE Markets as the target. It has since corrected the figure and deleted the post.
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The Correction Behind the Headline Number
Blockaid published its alert at 07:54 UTC, roughly 90 minutes after the exploit. MORE Markets disputed the alert in its own statement. Its team said the protocol functioned as designed and that no smart contract was compromised.
“At this time, there is no indication that MORE Markets was compromised or that any of its smart contracts were exploited. MORE is solvent, and no user funds have been lost,” the post read. “Out of caution, the protocol has been paused in order to protect users and their funds.”
Flow Foundation placed the incident timing at approximately 06:18 UTC. The statement said that neither Flow EVM nor the Flow network was breached.
“A vulnerability in Ankr’s ankrFLOW liquid staking contract allowed an attacker to create approximately 8.6 million ankrFLOW,” the team said. “The attacker then used this ankrFLOW as collateral on the MORE Markets lending protocol to drain its WFLOW reserve, taking around 15.5 million WFLOW, worth approximately $410,000.”
The attacker realized about $246,000 after slippage. Flow Foundation said it will work with Ankr to replace the drained funds and rebalance affected liquidity pools.
Both ankrFLOW staking and MORE Markets lending remain paused. They will reopen once Ankr ships a contract upgrade. The team assured that no depositor at either protocol has lost money.
The attack lands at the end of a punishing stretch for crypto protocols. Cronos halted its blockchain on August 30 after identifying an exploit at Tectonic, its largest lending market.
Last week, Moonwell lost an estimated $8.7 million. DefiLlama data records 37 hacks in August, totaling roughly $140 million.
Correction: An earlier version of this article reported that MORE Markets lost approximately $9.3 million, based on an alert from Blockaid. Blockaid has since corrected that figure and deleted the original post. The drained amount was roughly $410,000, and the root cause was a vulnerability in Ankr’s ankrFLOW liquid staking contract, not an exploit of MORE Markets. This article has been rewritten to reflect the corrected account.
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