Ankr airdrops new tokens, bought 6.8M HAY to ease bad debts
DeFi protocol Ankr has released further details about its ongoing efforts to reimburse the users impacted by the $5 million exploit that occurred on its platform earlier this month.
The web3 infrastructure developer said the compensation plan is scheduled to take part across several stages, highlighting that it will utilize a snapshot to recognize the affected aBNBc & aBNBb token holders.
To do that, Ankr has taken a snapshot on December 2, 2022 to airdrop the newly-released ankrBNB tokens to legitimate victims based on the balances they had before the exploit. So far, Ankr has completed various airdrops of ankrBNB and BNB tokens through smart contracts and liquidity pools.
Following recent deployment of its $15 million recovery fund, the cross-chain bridge solution is also injecting fresh funds to erase bad debts as a result of the exploit. Ankr has already kickstarted the recovery process through the first batch of buybacks worth $3 million, and it’s set to complete more buybacks in the coming weeks.
The team behind the BNB Chain-based protocol has bought nearly 6.8 million HAY tokens (out of the entire 17,747,582 HAY) to mitigate losses from the recent hack. Additionally, Ankr burned 6 million HAY, which is the first burn to the Helio Bad Debt Burn Address. These moves succeeded in stabilizing HAY’s price, pushing HAY/BUSD up to $0.98.
“The team has decided to further assess any potential corner cases that the Recovery Program did not initially take into account on a case-by-case basis. The main criteria will be protecting users that displayed non-malicious behavior at or after the time of the exploit. Malicious arbitrageurs that took advantage of the aBNBc exploit will not be included in the Recovery Program,” it said in a blog post.
Ankr estimates the damage to be $5 million worth of BNB across liquidity pools in various DEXes. In an announcement to its community, it emphasized that they discontinued aBNBc and aBNBb tokens. Instead, new ankrBNB tokens are minted and airdropped to affected users. This is by far the most important security measure, as the attack solely affected aBNBc, and other tokens were safe.
The attack on Ankr was relatively small in comparison with other recent attacks on DeFi projects, which have seen more than $3 billion stolen from various crypto protocols so far in 2022.
While the protocol has been through a few dark days, this is a learning experience. Additionally, this action plan is said to allow Ankr to more rapidly restore value to legitimate token holders while also accelerating the planned migration to an upgraded contract.
