Atlantis Loans
Summary
Atlantis Loans was a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol built on BNB Chain (BSC) that was abandoned by its development team in April 2023 due to financial distress. Despite the abandonment, active smart contracts and unrevoked user approvals remained on-chain, which an attacker exploited in June 2023 through a malicious governance proposal, ultimately draining an estimated $2.5 million from users. The protocol is now defunct, its website is down, and its TVL has collapsed to near zero.
Connected Entities
1 entitiesTimeline(10 events)
2021-01-01
Atlantis Loans launches as a decentralized lending protocol on BNB Smart Chain, modeled after Compound Finance.
2023-04-01
Development team publishes abandonment announcement on Medium, citing 6-8 months of financial difficulty. Protocol smart contracts remain live and governance remains active.
2023-04-12
First malicious governance proposal (Proposal ID 49) submitted by attacker. Proposal fails to reach quorum due to insufficient votes.
2023-06-07
Attacker submits second malicious governance proposal (Proposal ID 52) via GovernorBravo contract, targeting admin roles of all ABep20Delegator token contracts.
2023-06-10
Governance proposal executes after 48-hour timelock. Attacker takes admin control of proxy contracts, inserts backdoored implementation, and begins draining token approvals from user wallets. Initial losses estimated at approximately $1.1 million.
2023-06-11
Exploit discovered and reported publicly. BeosinAlert and PeckShieldAlert issue warnings. Revoke.cash deploys dedicated exploit checker for affected users.
2023-06-12
Attacker continues draining unrevoked approvals. PeckShield reports total losses exceeding $2.5 million. Web3 Is Going Great documents the incident.
2023-06-13
Rekt.news publishes post-mortem. Multiple security firms including Halborn, Neptune Mutual, Nefture Security, and SolidityScan publish detailed analyses.
2023-07-01
Team's deadline for burning 450,000 ATL tokens passes. Protocol website subsequently goes offline.
2026-05-01
Protocol TVL stands at approximately $2,902. DeFiLlama marks the protocol as having rug pulled user funds with website down. No recovery or remediation has been undertaken.
Decision Log
- hash: 8ctBG6NVxa5WSjcrcqX9NyNRAQPEmz9AXoctHLRZ2TFU
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain and source URLs are archived via the Internet Archive.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 5/4/2026, 2:54:41 AM
last updated: 5/30/2026, 4:06:01 AM
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