Summary
Zabu Finance was an Avalanche-based yield farming protocol that suffered a $3.2 million flash loan exploit on September 12, 2021, marking what was widely described as the first major DeFi hack on the Avalanche blockchain. The vulnerability — a known deflationary token accounting flaw that had already been exploited on Polygon two months prior — drained the protocol's SPORE staking pool and caused the ZABU token to collapse from approximately $0.004 to near-zero. The protocol attempted a v2 token relaunch but has since gone effectively dormant, with a TVL of approximately $5,000 and a website SSL certificate that expired in August 2022.
Connected Entities
1 entities · 10 linked investigationsTimeline(6 events)
2021-07-01
PolyYeld Finance on Polygon is exploited using the identical deflationary-token accounting flaw; YELD token crashes to zero. The vulnerability is publicly documented but no widespread industry remediation follows.
2021-09-12
Zabu Finance is exploited on Avalanche via flash loan attack targeting SPORE pool's deflationary token accounting flaw. Attacker mints approximately 4.5 billion ZABU tokens and dumps them on Pangolin and Trader Joe DEXes, stealing approximately $3.2 million. ZABU price collapses ~99.5%.
2021-09-13
Zabu Finance team sets all farm rewards to zero and announces a snapshot-based v2 token recovery plan. PeckShield publicly states the bug 'happened many times before.' SlowMist and Knownsec publish technical analyses of the exploit.
2021-09-13
Zabu Finance burns approximately 93.12 million ZABU tokens (valued at ~$360,000 at time of burn) as part of recovery efforts.
2022-08-22
Zabu Finance website SSL certificate expires and is not renewed, indicating active development and maintenance has ceased.
2026-05-01
DefiLlama records Zabu Finance TVL at approximately $5,147. ZABU token is delisted from major exchanges. Protocol is effectively dormant.
Decision Log
- hash: BJhzW1or5ePLnJPX26MfHjDs12XqREgqkSqsUY5wpL3U
- hash: GPiddwpJ4tSoZZEwvVUkqjmChYvwU6dewaZuMaZLq9HM
- hash: ESj6Ji1tWy5TCGjU7pkibbS6mPnrDdUVCf5UC7QysZWB
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, 2:54:54 AM
last updated: 6/15/2026, 7:50:04 PM
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