BNB Bridge exploiter liquidated for another $30m on Venus lending market

In August 2023, the address linked to the October 2022 BNB Chain cross-chain bridge exploit was partially liquidated on the Venus Protocol lending market for about $30 million after a sharp drop in the price of BNB pushed its leveraged position toward distress. This position originated when the exploiter, after minting 2 million BNB worth roughly $560 million during the bridge hack, deposited 900,000 BNB on Venus as collateral and borrowed around $150 million in stablecoins, making it one of the largest single debt positions in DeFi. Because this concentration posed systemic risk to Venus and the wider BNB Chain DeFi ecosystem if it were liquidated on the open market, Venus governance had previously approved a special mechanism giving BNB Chain’s core team exclusive whitelisted rights to liquidate that account. When BNB’s price slid toward the liquidation threshold near $220, the BNB Chain core team executed a controlled, manual liquidation of roughly $30 million of the exploiter’s debt using pre-funded USDT, rather than allowing standard public liquidators to compete on-chain. Venus and BNB Chain framed this as fulfilling a community-approved plan to “make the account healthy” and prevent bad debt or cascading liquidations that could have destabilized BNB’s price and stressed other DeFi positions on BNB Chain. The episode highlights how large hacked positions parked on lending protocols can become long-lived systemic risks, and how governance and chain teams are increasingly using bespoke, centralized controls—such as whitelisted liquidators and dedicated funds—to contain the impact of major exploits on DeFi markets.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• Binance Bridge Hacker Hit By $30M Liquidation On Venus (thedefiant.io)
• Opaque DeFi protocol Venus braces for $150M BNB liquidation (protos.com)
• Past exploit threatens $200M liquidation if BNB falls below $220 (cryptoslate.com)
• Venus Protocol faces potential liquidation of a massive $150M BNB ... (binance.com)
• Venus Protocol accumulates $2.15 million in bad debt after exploit (web3isgoinggreat.com)

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• Markets
• Lending
• Liquidation
• Venus