AutoShark Finance Mint Manipulation

On May 24, 2021 — five days after the PancakeBunny exploit — the BSC yield farm AutoShark Finance lost approximately $745,000 to a near-identical attack: a flash loan manipulated the SHARK/BNB price feeding the protocol's reward-mint calculation, causing it to mint vastly excessive SHARK, which the attacker dumped.

What happened

AutoShark calculated minted rewards from an on-chain SHARK/BNB price the attacker manipulated with flash-loaned capital — the same mechanism that drained PancakeBunny the week before. SHARK collapsed on the dump.

Aftermath

• Protocol effectively ended; no recovery.

Why it matters

AutoShark's value to the catalogue is its timing: it's a near-exact replay of PancakeBunny five days later, on the same chain, exploiting the same reward-mint-from-manipulable-price flaw. It is the cleanest possible demonstration of the catalogue's central thesis — the lesson was published, in detail, days before, and the next protocol shipped the identical bug anyway. Fork-driven growth phases don't just repeat old mistakes slowly over years; they sometimes repeat the same week's mistake within days, because the forks are too numerous and too fast to absorb even the most recent, most prominent post-mortem. The defensive answer (don't price rewards from a manipulable spot pool) had been freely available since bZx 2020.