Incident All ledgers
Venus Protocol: $11.2m
Venus Protocol lost $11.2m on 12 May 2022. Ranked 184th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 12 May 2022
- Lost
- $11.2m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Oracle Manipulation
- Method
- Stale Oracle Price
- Chains
- Binance Smart Chain
Attackers exploited Venus Protocol's LUNA market, where a hardcoded $0.10 minimum price held while Chainlink paused LUNA price updates, using cheaply bought LUNA as collateral to borrow about $11.2M before Venus suspended the market.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 184th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 28th in 2022.
- It accounts for 8.9% of the $125.7m in known losses in May 2022.
- 159 incidents in the ledger are classified as Oracle Manipulation, for $894.1m in total. This one is 1.3% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Venus
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 May 2021 | Venus Protocol | $100.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 15 Mar 2026 | Venus Core Pool | $3.7m | DeFi Protocol | Donation Attack | — |
| 29 Mar 2025 | Venus Core Pool | $902,000 | DeFi Protocol | Donation Attack | — |
| 11 Dec 2023 | Venus Protocol | $274,000 | DeFi Protocol | Oracle Misconfiguration | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Apr 2022 | DEUS Finance | $13.4m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 13 Apr 2023 | Yearn Finance | $11.5m | DeFi Protocol | Oracle Misconfiguration | — |
| 05 Feb 2021 | Yearn Finance | $11.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 22 Feb 2026 | Blend Pools V2 | $11.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 11 Jul 2026 | Bonzo Lend | $9.1m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
All failures in 2022 · The failures ledger
Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.
Cite this Bitminer.io, “Venus Protocol, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/venus-protocol-2022-05-12/. How this is built