Beanstalk Farms governance attack
The Ethereum stablecoin protocol Beanstalk lost about $182M in April 2022 when an attacker used a flash loan to borrow enough governance tokens to pass a malicious proposal that drained the protocol's funds in a single transaction.
Also known as: Beanstalk, Beanstalk Farms, BEAN
Summary
Beanstalk was an Ethereum-based credit and algorithmic-stablecoin protocol governed by holders of its STALK token. In April 2022 an attacker took out a large flash loan, used the borrowed assets to acquire a supermajority of governance power, and pushed through a malicious proposal that transferred the protocol's reserves to themselves — netting about $182 million — all within one transaction, before repaying the loan. [1][2]
Aftermath
Security firms described it as a "governance attack" exploiting Beanstalk's instant on-chain voting. The exploit drained the protocol's liquidity and collapsed its BEAN stablecoin's peg; the project later relaunched. [1][2]
Bracketed numbers refer to the numbered sources listed below.
Sources (2)
See also
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — Justin Sun token freezeProjectsWLFI, a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump and his family, blacklisted/froze the wallet of major investor Justin Sun in Sept 2025 — ~540–595M unlocked WLFI tokens (~$107M) plus ~2.4B locked. Sun sued, alleging an undisclosed admin 'blacklist backdoor'; WLFI denied it and threatened a countersuit. The dispute is ongoing.
Gala Games exploitTokensOn May 20, 2024 an attacker abused a privileged minter account on the GALA token contract to mint 5 billion GALA (≈$200M+ nominal) and dumped ~600M of them for ~$22M of ETH before Gala froze the address. Gala Games called it an internal access-control failure; the attacker later returned the ~$22M.
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