Bizarre $15 Million Eminence Hack An Unfinished Project by Andre Cronje

Last Updated on 6 November 2023 by CryptoTips.eu

Andre Cronje is the new rising star of the crypto scene thanks to the success of his DeFi protocol and coin Yearn Finance (YFI). This time round, the FOMO (fear of missing out) for his latest project got so big that hackers entered his coding as he slept and drained funds from it as it was still in the development phase.

The story reminded me of the Yam craze back in the second week of August which was the first sign on the wall that something was off in the world of DeFi. Yam was essentially the first of the meme food coins that threw the world of DeFi into despair during the second half of august (think of the hype surrounding Sushi, Kimchi and HotDog for other example).

At the time, Twitter account @brockhelmore, the developer for Yam, launched his DeFi project onto the crypto scene and was immediately met with heavy funding, to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars. Two days later the fairy tale story ended when a bug in the coding was found in essence making it “impossible to take any future governance actions.”

The discovery rendered the project immediately obsolete and the community threw in the towel. The developer apologized and started working on Yam2. It was the first time that Ethereum CEO Vitalik Buterin warned about the dangers of DeFi development.

Eminence

Meanwhile, coder Andre Cronje looked on at the Yam story, at the Sushi hype, at the rise and fall of Chainlink and continued developing his very own Yearn Finance protocol, which had launched in the background to great success at the end of July.

The story has been such a sellout ever since that Andre developed Eminence, an unfinished “economy for a gaming multiverse” as he called it.

While investors couldn’t wait and, above all, didn’t want to miss out, they poured money into the unfinished protocol, roughly for a value of $15 million. As Andre went to sleep on 28 September, someone hacked into project and drained the funds, before bizarrely also returning some 8 million back to his account.

He stated:

3AM I was messaged awake to find out a) almost 15m was deposited into the contracts b) the contracts were exploited for the full 15m and c) 8m was sent to my yearn: deployer account.

Cronje explained the ordeal a few hours ago in a bunch of tweets and stated he would try and solve it as soon as possible.

Given the closeness to the KuCoin hack, can we start speaking of a new hackers plague that is upsetting the crypto world altogether, or is that too soon?


Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / [email protected]