Alpha Homora
Summary
Alpha Homora is a leveraged yield farming protocol developed by Alpha Finance Lab (later rebranded to Alpha Venture DAO, then Stella) that allows users to take on leveraged positions in liquidity pools. On February 13, 2021, the protocol suffered a critical exploit in which an attacker drained approximately $37.5 million from Iron Bank (C.R.E.A.M. Finance) by exploiting multiple smart contract vulnerabilities in Alpha Homora V2, including a hidden undisclosed sUSD lending pool, a rounding miscalculation in the borrow function, and an unrestricted reserve function callable by anyone. The resulting bad debt between the two protocols remained largely unresolved for years, culminating in a public dispute in 2023 in which Iron Bank froze Alpha Homora user accounts, and Alpha Homora proposed surrendering approximately $32 million in user funds to satisfy the outstanding obligation.
Connected Entities
1 entities- + 1 more
Timeline(14 events)
2020-10-01
Alpha Homora V1 launches on Ethereum, enabling leveraged ETH yield farming.
2021-01-14
Quantstamp completes audit of Alpha Homora V2, identifying 4 high-severity issues all reported as fixed.
2021-01-20
PeckShield completes audit of Alpha Homora V2; no high-severity issues reported.
2021-01-28
Alpha Homora V2 launches on Ethereum mainnet, integrated with Iron Bank for protocol-to-protocol borrowing.
2021-02-13
Exploit occurs at 05:37 UTC: attacker drains approximately $37.5 million from Iron Bank via Alpha Homora V2 using a multi-transaction attack exploiting the hidden sUSD pool, a rounding miscalculation, and the publicly callable resolveReserve function.
2021-02-13
C.R.E.A.M. Finance pauses all Iron Bank markets and sets Alpha Homora V2 credit limit to zero pending investigation.
2021-02-13
Stolen funds routed through Tornado Cash and Curve Aave pool. Attacker sends 1,000 ETH each to Alpha and C.R.E.A.M. deployer addresses.
2021-02-14
Alpha Finance Lab releases post-mortem; confirms team has identified a 'prime suspect'; agrees to 20% protocol fee diversion and 50 million ALPHA token collateral to cover Iron Bank debt.
2021-03-01
Alpha Homora V2 relaunches with restricted token support (ETH, DAI, USDC, USDT) and additional security mitigations.
2022-03-31
Alpha Finance Lab rebrands to Alpha Venture DAO, pivoting to a Web3 incubation and DAO governance model while retaining the ALPHA token.
2023-03-02
Iron Bank publicly reports Alpha Homora's outstanding debt at $31,947,429, with only $481,746 repaid in 25 months. Iron Bank freezes Alpha Homora's lending accounts by altering smart contract code.
2023-03-01
Alpha Venture DAO publishes open letter to Iron Bank, characterizing the account freeze as an unauthorized seizure of user funds.
2023-03-01
Alpha Homora proposes that Iron Bank retain approximately $32 million in user-deposited assets to satisfy the outstanding debt obligation.
2023-06-01
Core development team relaunches leveraged DeFi product as Stella on Arbitrum, with a 0% cost-to-borrow Pay-As-You-Earn model.
Decision Log
- hash: Htq8AEoK7qqQRAbmzTK3fUeaTf9FR7fT3qxMvNAiMekN
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain and source URLs are archived via the Internet Archive.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 5/30/2026, 7:10:41 PM
last updated: 5/30/2026, 7:10:44 PM
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