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I learned the unfair advantage of a decentralized application when my exchange was hacked

Crypto Cutie
3 min readMar 20, 2021

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Last week PancakeSwap, the decentralized exchange where I put my money, suffered a hack. I didn’t lose anything. When things got back to normal, I bought more CAKE (PancakeSwap’s native token) to celebrate. Thanks to this incident, I realized the decentralized application’s unfair advantage over the centralized one in terms of security.

What is Pancake Swap?

PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange of cryptocurrency. The logo is a pancake in the form of a lovely bunny’s head.

PancakeSwap allows users to exchange between tokens (Swap) and become liquidity providers by investing pairs of tokens into liquidity pools(Farms). It has other fancy things like Staking, Lottery, and Collectible NFT of bunnies in various versions.

From: pancakeswap.finance

I was so enticed by these cute bunnies to the extent that I wanted to put money there. By the way, the fees on Binance Smart Chain are low, so it makes PancakeSwap a perfect choice!

What is the incident?

The hacker managed to gain access to PancakeSwap’s DNS(Domain Name Servers) account and hijack their DNS. The hacker redirected PancakeSwap’s URL to a phishing site which tried to trick users into inputting their wallet’s seed phrase. As said in…

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Crypto Cutie
Crypto Cutie

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