Yearn.Finance puts expanded treasury to use by repaying victims of $11M hack

Major decentralized finance protocol Yearn.Finance (YFI) has restored its yDAI vault in the aftermath of a $11 million exploit by hackers.

Yearn announced Tuesday that they opened a Maker vault with YFI tokens from the treasury and minted 9.7 million DAI tokens from the vault to keep the yDAI vault intact. Using borrowed money allows the project to reimburse users without taking a hit to the treasury, either due to possible YFI appreciation or by gradually repaying the debt with protocol revenue. The team said that this is a one-off occurrence, as they expect users to hedge their own risks by purchasing coverage from Yearn ecosystem member Cover, which also got hacked recently.

yDAI vault restored!

Yearn has opened a Maker Vault with YFI from the Treasury to mint 9.7m DAI and make the yDAI vault whole.

It was done as a one-off celebration of going through this DeFi rite of passage. Don’t count on it happening again. Make sure to buy Cover next time. pic.twitter.com/6xNh3XEVYZ

— yearn.finance (@iearnfinance) February 9, 2021

The yDAI vault’s exploit was accompanied with a 15% crash in the price of Yearn Finance’s governance token in less than two hours, with YFI subsequently dropping from $35,000 to as low as $29,600. At the time of writing, YFI is trading at $31,747, down 2.4% over the past 24 hours.

Despite the brief crash, the total value locked in Yearn remained somewhat steady, with its TVL staying above the levels of January 2021 and December 2020. At publishing time, Yearn’s TVL amounts to $481.8 million, up around 1% over the past 24 hours, according to data from DeFi Pulse. Yearn is the 14th largest DeFi protocol by TVL at the time of writing.

The restoration of yDAI vault comes a couple of days after Yearn reported that its V1 version of yDAI vault was exploited by a hacker on Feb. 4. The exploit reportedly caused a loss of $11 million, though the attacker failed to reap most of the loot, with just 513,000 DAI and $1.7 million USDT going to the perpetrator.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Yearn.finance core core contributors and community members submitted and passed a proposal to increase the supply of YFI by 6666 tokens, or about $225 million at the time of proposal. The proposal is part of a wider discussion about incentives for DeFi developers, with the Yearn.finance community feeling like its contributors were not being properly incentivized amid much larger war chests from competitors.

The latest exploit is not the first attack targeting Andre Cronje-backed DeFi protocols. In September 2020, Eminence, an unreleased project being built by Yearn’s Andre Cronje, suffered a $15 million exploit.