Decentralized exchange Bunni has announced it is shutting down following an $8.4 million exploit in September, making it the second crypto project to cease operations this week. The team revealed in a recent X post that a lack of funds is the primary reason behind winding down. “The recent exploit has forced Bunni’s growth to a halt, and to securely relaunch, we’d need to cover 6-7 figure expenses just for audits and monitoring — capital we simply don’t have,” they explained. Bunni’s development costs and other expenditures required to restore the protocol proved unattainable.
This shutdown follows shortly after the founding team behind the layer-1 blockchain Kadena announced they would cease operations due to challenging market conditions.
Bunni was exploited on September 2 for $8.4 million across Ethereum and the layer-2 network Unichain, temporarily halting operations. The attack leveraged vulnerabilities in the protocol’s codebase, as detailed in a September 4 blog post. Built on Uniswap v4, Bunni optimized returns for liquidity providers through its unique Liquidity Distribution Function. Prior to the breach, Bunni experienced explosive growth, with TVL rising from $2.23 million in June to nearly $80 million by mid-August.
Despite shutting down, the team relicensed Bunni v2 smart contracts from Business Source License to the MIT license, an open-source framework praised by the community. This move empowers developers to freely utilize Bunni’s innovations such as liquidity distribution functions, surge fees, and autonomous rebalancing. Users can continue withdrawing assets via the website until further notice.
Remaining treasury funds will be distributed to BUNNI, LIT, and veBUNNI tokenholders pending legal approval, while team members will not receive payouts. The team is also collaborating with law enforcement to recover the stolen $8.4 million.
Meanwhile, despite the Kadena team stepping down, the network will continue as a community-driven project, although its native token KDA has fallen sharply, trading at $0.06 after a 70% drop post-announcement.
For more details, visit: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bunni-dex-becomes-second-crypto-project-shutter-this-week
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bunni-dex-becomes-second-crypto-project-shutter-this-week