Origin Dollar Got Hacked For Approximately $7 Million: Report

The Ethereum-based Origin Dollar crypto platform has just been hacked in a flash loan attack that came on the heels of recent attacks that continue to undermine the confidence in the DeFi space so let’s read more in today’s crypto news.

Origin Protocol and its co-founder Matthew Liu confirmed a few hours ago that there was an attack on the Origin Dollar OUSD Vault. He wrote:

“The team is all-hands on deck attempting to figure out what vulnerability was exploited and how the hacker was able to access users’ deposits.”

Origin Dollars' $OUSD got exploited for $5.5M in ETH, around 11,800 ETH AND $2.2M in DAI

Attack: https://t.co/opyaZY2hjs

Attacker's Address:https://t.co/fkaUqphEqx

Share, stay vigilant pic.twitter.com/xHIdP1Md63

— Krisma (@KRMA_0) November 17, 2020

The exact exploit or the form of the attack is not known yet but the Origin team estimated $7 million were lost in a combination of ETH and DAI stablecoin which were stolen. Liu indicated that he wasn’t certain yet whether the funds that are over $1 million of which he believes came from Origin employees, could be eventually recovered. To quiet down the rumors, Liu continued:

“This is not a rug pull or internal scam. Despite this setback, it is very much in our intention to make OUSD a safe, secure, and successful product that builds on the broader Origin mission of peer-to-peer commerce.”

Origin is a blockchain-based e-commerce platform and it introduced its OUSD Stablecoin at the end of September as it is backed not by fiat but by other stablecoins like DAI. As a result of the hack, the stablecoin is meant to be equivalent to $1.00 but it then dropped to $0.54. The attack could further undermine the confidence that the users have in the security of decentralized finance protocols since many of them are built on Ethereum. Over the past month, Harvest Finance, Value Defi, and Akropolis have all been attacked via flash loan vulnerabilities which led to a loss of $40 million combined.

Speaking of hacks recently, In 2019, a crypto crime like hacks, fraud, and thefts reached $4.5 billion according to the data that we have in our news by forensics company CipherTrace which shows that the number for this year dropped to $1.8 billion which means crypto crime reduced by 60%. However, The Defi space saw an explosion in criminal activity this year.  The DeFi hacks contributed to 20 percent of this years’ number according to the blockchain analytics company. 20% of these hacks came from the decentralized finance or DeFi space which are transactions on platforms that facilitate lending services outside of banks.