Ankr Makes Rapid Progress After the Hack with Recovery Plan Targets and Milestones

It has been a week since Ankr discovered a hack that led to an exorbitant minting of its BNB liquid staking token (aBNBc) and its accelerated exchange for other cryptocurrencies on decentralized exchanges. The hack was carried out by an unauthorized third party. The Ankr team was able to swiftly patch the vulnerability within hours and launch an initial $15 million Recovery Fund.

This fund has now been exceeded, in order to pay DeFi BNB liquidity providers, BNB lenders, and DeFi protocol users that were impacted by the aBNBc attack. A snapshot was obtained on December 2, 2022, at 12:43:18 AM +UTC (Block number: 23545403). The compensation plan is expected to take place over the course of numerous stages so that Ankr can monitor conversions and respond fast to refund all valid and affected aBNBc and aBNBb token holders.

Completion Of Ankr’s Recovery Plan Objectives

Following the publication of the Recovery Strategy on the Ankr blog and the company’s official social media channels, the Ankr team took a number of steps in order to initiate the process of paying users for the full extent of the losses they sustained as a direct result of the exploit. Through the use of smart contracts and liquidity pools, Ankr has been successful up to this point in completing a number of different airdrops of ankrBNB and BNB tokens.

These airdrops were given to wallet addresses that owned aBNBc and aBNBb at the time that the snapshot was taken. In order to protect their communities and look out for what is in their best interests, the team is collaborating closely with a number of different DeFi protocols. In the future, Ankr will continue to provide new updates as they become available. The following objectives outlined in Ankr’s Recovery Plan have been accomplished as of this moment:

1. Re-stabilized HAY Price

Ankr completed the acquisition of 6,843,323 HAY on decentralized exchanges on Thursday, December 8, 2022, out of a total of 17,747,582 HAY worth of accumulated bad debt. The price of HAY was successfully stabilized as a result of this move, which resulted in HAY/BUSD reaching $0.98. The process of replacing collateral will be ongoing until the elimination of all delinquent debt throughout the course of the next few weeks.

An additional 6,000,000 HAY was burned by Ankr on the 13th of December, marking the first burn to the Helio Bad Debt Burn Address. Immediately following the occurrence, the Helio team announced that it would be repurchasing the surplus HAY and delivering it to an address where it would be burned. Before the event, the whole value of Helio Protocol had been locked at around $90 million, and Helio had already bought back $3 million worth of bad debt in HAY on the open market.

2. Airdropped ankrBNB to Affected DeFi Users

Ankr distributed an airdrop of ankrBNB on Friday, December 9th, 2022, to wallet addresses that had aBNBc and aBNBb at the time of the snapshot. This was accomplished by using smart contracts for a number of partner DeFi protocols. Ankr was successful in completing the airdrop for the protocols that are listed below:

3. Airdropped BNB to Affected LPs

Ankr airdropped BNB to wallet addresses on December 12th, 2022, provided that those wallet addresses were holding BNB through either the aBNBc or aBNBb liquidity pools. The following is a list of the liquidity pools that Ankr compensated addresses:

4. Airdropped ankrBNB to Missing Addresses

Through the use of smart contracts built on the following protocols, Ankr also airdropped  ankrBNB to missing wallet addresses that had aBNBc and aBNBb in their wallets at the time the snapshot was taken:

5. Unlocked ankrBNB Transfers

Ankr is unblocking the transferability of newly airdropped ankrBNB tokens now that trading for aBNBc and aNBb tokens has been halted and the token migration to the new ankrBNB has been completed.

6. Plan for Reimbursing Wombat stkBNB LPs

Ankr and pStake have come to an arrangement for the former to airdrop 2,654.352 ankrBNB and the latter to airdrop 681.051 stkBNB, which will help to partially replace the loss of stkBNB liquidity providers on Wombat. Ankr has come to an agreement with the management team of Wombat regarding adequate compensation, despite the fact that the nature of the mixed liquidity pools on the decentralized exchange makes it difficult to accurately estimate the losses sustained by affected users.

7. 100% coverage for Wombat BNB LPs

Ankr will offer complete protection for the BNB Wombat LP, which is estimated to be worth 14,407,155 BNB (before Christmas at the latest).

Ankr’s Plans For More Investigation

The Ankr team has come to the conclusion that it is necessary to do additional case-by-case analysis in order to investigate any possible edge circumstances that the Recovery Program did not initially take into account. The primary consideration will be safeguarding users who, either at the time of the exploit or after it, exhibited behavior that was not malevolent.

Arbitrageurs with malicious intentions who take advantage of the aBNBc vulnerability will be excluded from the Recovery Program. The Ankr team is working around the clock to compensate users for any and all losses they have sustained as a direct result of the exploit, and Ankr will continue to give updates as long as the airdrops are ongoing.