$47M stolen from Vietnamese blockchain platform by hackers

"Dear KyberSwap Elastic Users. We regret to inform you that KyberSwap Elastic has experienced a security incident. As a precautionary measure, we strongly advise all users to promptly withdraw their funds," Kyber Network's official account on X, formerly known as Twitter, posted Thursday morning.

A Kyber representative said its team is dealing with the issue and would give no further comments.

The Block, citing blockchain data, revealed that Kyber's liquidity pools have been attacked by hackers, who stole $7 million worth of Ethereum, $20.7 million worth of Arbitrum, $15 million worth of Optimism, $3 million worth of Polygon and $2 million worth of Base. The total amount of cryptocurrency stolen amounted to over $47 million, and all of them had been transferred to a sole digital wallet.

Following the attack, the alleged hackers left a message saying negotiations could begin in a few hours.

An account named 0xngmi, a member of the cryptocurrency data analysis site DefiLlama, wrote on X that "Seems like hacker is just draining the Kyber LP pools."

Data from DefiLlama revealed that the total amount of property that users sent into the Kyber project has seen their values dropped from $86 million to $27 million following the announcement of the attack.

The price of the KNC token by Kyber network has also dropped from $0.756 at around 6 a.m. to $0.721 at around 6:35 a.m. By noon, the token's price was hovering at around $0.725.

Kyber Network was founded in 2017 by Loi Luu, Victor Tran and Yaron Velner. It was one of the first blockchain projects to be developed by Vietnamese and garnered international attention. The main products of Kyber Network include decentralized platform KyberSwap and digital property management platform Krystal.

KyberSwap Elastic is ranked 25th among the global cryptocurrency market, with the total value of transactions within 24 hours at $31.6 million, accounting for 0.592% of the market, according to Coinmarketcap.

In April, Kyber Network also told users to withdraw their money from the platform after detecting a potential vulnerability. In September last year, Kyber also confirmed that it was attacked by hackers, who stole $265,000 worth of cryptocurrency.