[Image Description: A tweet and a screencap of text from an article. The tweet is by Ed Zitron. It reads: “Once again, someone legally took over $180m from a cryptocurrency project, which is incorrectly being described as ‘an attack’ rather than someone using Code Is Law to their advantage, taking out a loan to control a project and drain it of its money.” The tweet includes a link to the article. The screencap of text from the article reads as follows:

Here’s what happened:

• Like many cryptocurrency projects, Beanstalk allows you to vote on governance issues to control the project. This is a big part of the “code is law” ideal behind cryptocurrency, where you can “steer the future of the project” based on how many tokens you have.
• In this case, the “attacker” used something called a flash loan (a loan you hold for seconds or minutes specifically to take advantage of the volatility of cryptocurrencies) to get a controlling amount of Beanstalk’s “stalk” token.
• In complete accordance with how Beanstalk’s governance works, they used these tokens to create a proposal to give him all of Beanstalk’s money ($182 million), a proposal that the attacker then used their massive amount of tokens to vote “yes” on. I’m not going into the point of that $182 million because it’s boring and irrelevant, but let’s say it was the pooled funds to make the project work.
• On receipt, they then returned the funds to the flash loan company, making about $80 million in the process.

Much of what has been written about this has (as I have) used the term “attacker,” as if an attack was made in anything other than complete accordance with how the project worked. The project was set up to allow the largest amount of votes to pass whatever proposal was made, which, in this case, was “I think that I should have all of the money.” To describe this as an attack, a hack, or “malevolent” is to misunderstand the vacuous idea of “code is law” and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

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