Uniswap, Curve Daily Trading Volumes Surges Past $2B, Likely Driven by Harvest Attack

Oct 26, 2020 at 14:03 UTCUpdated Oct 26, 2020 at 14:18 UTC.Automated market makers Curve and Uniswap traded volumes above $2 billion on Monday, benefiting from one of decentralized finance protocol Harvest Finance's darkest days.

Daily trading volume on Uniswap surged by over 1,200% to a record $2.04 billion, surpassing the previous record high of $953.59 million registered on Sept. 1 by a big margin.

"Volume on Uniswap surged, as the Harvest Finance exploiter likely ran money through the automated market maker," Denis Vinokourov, head of the research at the London-based prime brokerage Bequant, told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.

Daily trading volume on decentralized exchange Curve Finance also surged to over $2 billion.

A malicious entity exploited Harvest Finance early Monday and drained $24 million from the yield farming protocol launched in early September.

"The economic attack was performed through the curve y pool, stretching the price of the stablecoins on Curve out of proportion and depositing and withdrawing a large amount of assets through harvest," Harvest Finance said.

The attacker took a flash loan to manipulate prices on Curve Y Pool to drain USDT and USDC many times.

The entity then converted the funds to tokenized bitcoin in form of renBTC and exited to bitcoin.

The anonymous team behind Harvest Finance has announced a $100,000 bounty for the first person or group to reach out to the hacker.

The Harvest Finance team is actively tracking the funds and has identified 10 bitcoin addresses of the flash loan attacker.