Summary
Ankr is a Web3 infrastructure and liquid staking protocol founded in 2017, providing RPC endpoints for over 75 blockchains and BNB Chain-based liquid staking products. In December 2022, a former employee executed a supply chain attack that compromised Ankr's private deployer key, enabling unlimited minting of aBNBc tokens and resulting in approximately $5 million in direct losses, with cascading secondary losses of roughly $19 million through Helio Protocol's HAY stablecoin depeg. Ankr subsequently compensated affected users, implemented multi-signature controls, and continues to operate, though questions persist over the completeness of user reimbursement.
Connected Entities
1 entitiesTimeline(13 events)
2017-01-01
Ankr founded by Chandler Song, Ryan Fang, and Stanley Wu.
2019-03-01
ANKR token launched via ICO on Binance Launchpad, raising approximately $18.7 million.
2019-01-01
Ankr mainnet released.
2020-01-01
Ankr launches Stkr liquid staking protocol, introducing aBNBc and related derivatives.
2022-12-01
Former Ankr employee's malicious supply chain code activates upon a legitimate software update, exfiltrating the deployer private key.
2022-12-02
Attacker deploys malicious aBNBc contract and mints approximately 60 trillion aBNBc tokens. PeckShield flags exploit at 12:35 UTC. Approximately $5 million extracted via PancakeSwap and bridged to Ethereum. aBNBc price crashes ~99.5%.
2022-12-02
Secondary exploit against Helio Protocol: attackers use collapsed aBNBc as collateral to drain approximately $15.5 million from Helio's HAY stablecoin pool via an unupdated price oracle. HAY depegs to $0.20.
2022-12-02
Approximately 3,360 ETH laundered through Tornado Cash; additional 900 BNB sent through Tornado Cash.
2022-12-02
Ankr issues public statement confirming exploit, requests trading halt on aBNBc, announces compensation plan.
2022-12-21
Ankr formally attributes attack to a former team member, announces law enforcement referral, and details new multi-signature security controls.
2023-01-01
Victims group publicly alleges Ankr provided only 50% reimbursement to users affected through Stader and pStake protocols.
2024-01-01
Ankr's Asphere enterprise arm achieves SOC 2 Type 1 compliance.
2025-01-01
Ankr's Asphere achieves SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. No public confirmation of prosecution of the former employee has been reported.
Decision Log
- hash: 9e9TDMXKDRbn5ePghK8eBMPG1ZWigzGZsjPMPbW1hKVp
- hash: AqrHcu4zqecH9PBRDbmZrFGhqrDpFYMH5noBhYc33RRz
- hash: 44EDSHq2t28nEkLFic9LE2947m52hSXKBHi8NSfTxDYS
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain and source URLs are archived via the Internet Archive.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 5/4/2026, 2:54:46 AM
last updated: 6/14/2026, 11:16:00 PM
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