Cointelegraph by Tarang Khaitan
Decentralized exchange Bunni has announced it is shutting down following an $8.4 million exploit in September, and is now the second crypto project team to throw in the towel this week, citing difficult circumstances.
In a Thursday X post, the team stated that it will be winding down operations due to a lack of funds.
“The recent exploit has forced Bunni’s growth to a halt, and in order to securely relaunch, we’d need to pay 6-7 figures in audit & monitoring expenses alone – requiring capital that we simply don’t have,” they said.
The team said they would need to spend a considerable amount on development costs and other expenditures to get the protocol back on track, which the team does not have.
It only followed days after the founding team behind layer-1 blockchain Kadena said it would cease operations due to difficult market conditions.
Bunni DEX exploited in September
The protocol was exploited on Sept. 2 to the tune of $8.4 million across Ethereum and layer-2 network Unichain. Operations were then halted.
In a Sept. 4 blog post, Bunni said the malicious actors exploited the protocol’s codebase.
Bunni DEX was built on Uniswap v4 to optimize returns for liquidity providers through the use of its custom mechanism called Liquidity Distribution Function.
Prior to the exploit, Bunni was growing at an exponential rate, as its TVL skyrocketed from $2.23 million on June 10 to nearly $80 million on Aug. 19, according to DefiLlama.
Open-sourcing the code
Despite ceasing operations, the team has relicensed Bunni v2 smart contracts from Business Source License to MIT license, which is an open-source software license, which garnered some praise from the community.
This will allow any developer to use all the features and innovations developed by Bunni, like Liquidity distribution functions, surge fees, and autonomous rebalancing.
The team has also stated that users will be able to withdraw their assets via the website until further notice. Moreover, the remaining treasury assets will be distributed to BUNNI, LIT, and veBUNNI tokenholders after receiving the necessary legal approval; however, team members will not receive any funds.
The team said it will continue to work with law enforcement agencies to recover the $8.4 million stolen by malicious actors.
Kadena founding team exits
On Tuesday, the founding team behind layer-1 blockchain Kadena announced that it will be winding down and ceasing all network operations.
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The team cited tough market conditions as the reason for closing shop. Despite the founding team stepping down, the network will continue to exist and will be community-driven.
However, the network’s native token KDA has crashed 70% since the announcement, and currently trades for $0.06, according to CoinGecko.
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