Moonwell Hit with $9M Price Manipulation Exploit

Moonwell, a decentralized lending protocol, has suffered its third security incident in nine months. An attacker manipulated the price of the illiquid MAMO token on Moonwell's Base lending market, driving its value up about eightfold from around $0.0105 to nearly $0.088.

This allowed the attacker to borrow real crypto assets like cbBTC, USDC, wstETH, and ETH against inflated collateral that was never repaid.

The security firm ExVul says the attacker spent about $7 million buying MAMO to force the price up, then sold roughly $3.2 million of it back, taking a loss of close to $3.8 million on the token trades alone.