Tokenized Google stock inflated 7,700% in rare DeFi lending exploit

Summary

• Edel Finance halted its version-one lending protocol after an attacker manipulated the wrapping mechanism for a tokenized Google stock, inflating collateral values by about 78 times and creating roughly $403,000 in bad debt.
• The exploit did not stem from faulty price oracles —Chainlink feeds correctly reported Alphabets share price — but from how GOOGLx converted to and from its wrapped form wGOOGLx, allowing the attacker to borrow real assets against mispriced collateral.
• Edel said it will absorb all losses so depositors are made whole, is rolling out a redesigned version-two system to prevent similar price-manipulation attacks, and has offered the attacker a white-hat settlement while coordinating with exchanges.

Tokenized equities trading platform Edel Finance paused its lending protocol on Tuesday after an attacker exploited how it priced a tokenized stock, borrowing against collateral inflated to roughly 78 times its true value and leaving about $403,000 in bad debt, the team said.

An Update from the Edel Team

Earlier today, Edel identified and contained an exploit affecting Edel Lending.

The exploit involved manipulation of the wrapped xStocks exchange rate between wGOOGLx and GOOGLx, causing wGOOGLx collateral to be valued at approximately 78x its…

The target was a tokenized version of Alphabet's Google stock. Edel Lending accepted wGOOGLx, a wrapped form of the tokenized share GOOGLx, as collateral.

A wrapped token is a version of an asset repackaged to work inside a particular protocol, and it is meant to track the underlying asset one for one. The attacker manipulated the exchange rate between the two so that wGOOGLx was valued at about 78 times what it should have been, then used that phantom collateral to borrow real assets from the protocol.

The pricing itself was not the weak point. Edel said it used Chainlink oracles, the standard third-party services that feed real-world prices onto a blockchain, and those were reporting the correct Google share price of around $357.

The flaw was in the wrapping mechanism. The attacker interfered with how GOOGLx converted to and from wGOOGLx, so the collateral was mispriced even though the underlying price feed was accurate.