Popular decentralized finance protocol Pickle Finance was hacked on Saturday, draining $19.7 million in DAI, a decentralized stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, from a Pickle wallet.
Pickle came on the scene Sept. 11 as one of many food-themed DeFi projects. The fully automated system rewards users with interest payments and token disbursements in PICKLE, ether and stablecoin pairings for providing liquidity to several stablecoin pools.
On Friday, the team introduced the cDAI jar, a “new strategy” aimed at maximizing returns from DAI deposited on the decentralized lending protocol Compound. The Pickle team, and a group of “white hat hackers” have traced the 19,759,355 DAI weekend exploit to this smart contract, according to a blog post.
“We’re encouraging all LPs to withdraw their funds from the Jars until the issues have been resolved,” the Pickle team tweeted.
Pantera Raises $134M for Its Bitcoin Fund
Cryptocurrency firm Pantera Capital has raised $134 million for its bitcoin fund, according to a form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Formed in 2013, the Pantera Bitcoin Fund Ltd. was the first U.S.-based bitcoin fund. In an investor letter at the end of 2017, Pantera boasted a 25,004% return on the fund, mainly due to the bitcoin bull run of that year.
Recently, CoinDesk discovered that Pantera’s venture funds hadn’t fared well in comparison to the S&P 500.
The venture funds Pantera Capital raised in August 2013 and August 2014 have returned 46.5% and 15.9% from their inception to September 2019, respectively. Of course, that performance may have improved as of late due to bitcoin’s recent bull run. As of press time, the price of bitcoin has risen around 159% year to date.