Crypto exchange Huobi alleged that pNetwork’s “white hat attack” to drain its liquidity pool on PancakeSwap was a premeditated theft.
On Thursday, multi-chain bridge pNetwork suspended the GALA bridge on Ethereum, claiming that a misconfigured bridge contract had made it vulnerable to an exploit. The protocol then drained its PancakeSwap liquidity pool in an apparent attempt to front-run any malicious actors.
Traders who missed the memo interpreted the on-chain activity as an ongoing exploit, then sank the price of GALA by 33% to $0.28.
Huobi also claims that pNetwork left it in the dark. The crypto exchange converted users’ GALA tokens into a new token called pGALA, calling it a “meme token” before delisting the GALA/USDT trading pair.
pNetwork said on Sunday that its attempts to get Huobi to suspend deposits of the token hadn’t gone through.
Later that day, Huobi issued a statement that said that pNetwork had stolen the money from the PancakeSwap pool for “malicious profit.”
“We believe that this is a premeditated hacking attack planned by the pNetwork team, and the white hat attack is just an illegal excuse sought by the pNetwork team to avoid legal sanctions,” alleged Huobi.
The exchange said that pNetwork “falsely claimed” its bridge was misconfigured and that its record of events “seriously deviates from the facts.”
Huobi claims that pNetwork’s actions caused its users to lose a lot of money. It plans to sue pNetwork unless the multi-chain bridge compensates those affected.
