Crypto Lending Protocol FilDA Hacked, Halts Operations

Cross-chain lending DeFi project FilDA Finance has halted operations on the Elastos Smart Chain (ESC) and REI Network following an exploit.

The company said that the hack had taken place in the early hours of Sunday morning (April 23).

Crypto Lending Protocol FilDA Hacked

In a public statement, FilDA said the exploit resulted in a loss of approximately 700,000 USD. It added that “the vulnerability has been identified and the attack vector isolated.”

While the investigation is ongoing, FilDA said the ESC and Rei FilDA platforms had been halted. The DeFi project added it was tracing the hacker’s activities, and its initial investigations showed that the attacker’s address interacted with multiple crypto exchanges.

According to its official Telegram group, the attack affected all digital assets on FilDA’s ESC Chain, which included the Elastos token, Bitcoin, and BUSD.

It appears that the project is working fine on other chains as an admin for the project advised a community member to bridge his FilDA tokens to Heco. Meanwhile, FilDA postponed its launch on BitTorrent Chain to an undisclosed date because of the hack.

According to its February monthly report, FilDA has total deposits and loans of $21.3 million. The project also has 145,574 current addresses on the network.

This is not the first time FilDA’s ESC chain has been exploited. In April 2022, the project lost around $2 million to a flash loan attack. At the time, the crypto startup instituted a remediation plan for affected users. It is unclear if the company will adopt a similar plan for the recent FilDA hack.

FilDA Price Unaffected So Far

Despite the FilDA hack, FilDA’s token has risen by more than 2% in the last 24 hours to $0.00170406 at the time of writing, according to Coingecko data.

The FILDA token had dropped by more than 7% in the previous seven days and by over 13% in the last 30 days.

However, a mild market recovery at the weekend has improved sentiments surrounding the token. Over the last 24 hours, Bitcoin has risen above $27,000, while ETH trades at $1,867.

DeFi Exploits Rising

This incident further highlights the risks of DeFi and adds to the growing tally of losses from hacks in 2023.

Earlier this month, SushiSwap was hit for over $3 million in a single attack. Meanwhile, several DeFi protocols, including Allbridge, Sentiment, and Yearn Finance, were exploited for more than $20 million between them.