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Moonwell Lending Market on Base Hit by $8.7M MAMO Price-Manipulation Exploit

Inflating MAMO’s market price allowed an attacker to borrow high-value assets including cbBTC, prompting Moonwell to freeze borrowing while it investigates.

Overview

  • Moonwell announced on Thursday, August 27, 2026 that it set the MAMO borrow cap to 1 wei and tightened supply caps for MAMO and WELL, effectively preventing new borrowing on the affected market.
  • Security firms CertiK, PeckShield and Blockaid reported the attacker pushed up MAMO’s market price, deposited the inflated tokens as collateral, and used that collateral to borrow deeper‑liquidity assets.
  • On‑chain tracing and CertiK reported about $8.7 million of proceeds consolidated at an attacker address while Crypto Briefing estimated the exploit involved roughly $10 million of borrowed assets and more than $4 million in cbBTC drained.
  • Moonwell said it is conducting a thorough review to quantify losses, check whether any funds can be recovered, and define safeguards and conditions for reopening the MAMO market.
  • The incident underlines a common DeFi weakness: tokens with shallow order books can be cheaply price‑manipulated, which can then feed oracles and let attackers over‑borrow unless protocols tighten oracle feeds and collateral rules.