Posts from March 2020

Attacking the DeFi Ecosystem with Flash Loans for Fun and Profit

defi blockchain security attacks flash loans March 11, 2020 at 02:00 PM Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Benjamin Livshits, and Arthur Gervais
Flash loans are a recent blockchain smart contract construct that enable the issuance of loans that are only valid within one transaction and must be repaid by the end of that transaction. This post examines recent flash loan attacks on DeFi, and outlines how they could have been far more effective, boosting attack profitability to 829K USD (instead of 350K USD) and 1.1M USD (instead of 600K USD), respectively.