Nirvana Finance hack — July 2022
Incident facts
| Date of incident | |
|---|---|
| Publicly disclosed | July 28, 2022 |
| Target type | Decentralised exchange |
| Loss | $3,600,000Published estimates range $3,500,000 to $3,600,000Price at time of incident |
| Method | Flash loan attackFlash loan used to inflate the protocol's own reserve valuation, which the ANA bonding curve used to price mints and redemptions, letting the attacker mint ANA cheaply and sell it back to the treasury at the inflated price inside one transaction. |
| Chains | Solana |
| Attributed to | Shakeeb AhmedConfirmed |
| Outcome | Arrests or charges |
What happened
On 28 July 2022 an attacker drained the treasury behind Nirvana Finance, a Solana protocol whose ANA token was priced by a bonding curve against a pool of stablecoin reserves. According to CoinDesk's reporting the same day, the attacker took a flash loan of more than 10 million USDC from the lending protocol Solend and deposited it so that Nirvana's contracts read the borrowed funds as genuine treasury liquidity. That inflated the price the bonding curve was willing to pay: over $10 million of ANA was minted and the entire amount swapped back for about $3.5 million of USDT from Nirvana's treasury wallet, with the flash loan repaid inside the same transaction. ANA fell around 80 percent and Nirvana's NIRV stablecoin lost its peg, trading near eight cents. The proceeds were bridged to Ethereum through Wormhole and converted to DAI. Nirvana suspended trading and publicly asked for the funds back.
The figures differ slightly. Contemporaneous on-chain reporting described about $3.5 million, and Forkast put it at $3.49 million; the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York later put it at $3.6 million and said that was approximately all the funds Nirvana held. The protocol shut down shortly afterwards.
Shakeeb Ahmed, a U.S. citizen who was a senior security engineer at Amazon at the time, pleaded guilty to computer fraud in December 2023 over this attack and a separate roughly $9 million attack on another decentralised exchange weeks earlier. He was sentenced on 12 April 2024 to three years in prison, ordered to forfeit about $12.3 million, and to pay more than $5 million in restitution across both victims.
Law enforcement
Prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and IRS Criminal Investigation). Shakeeb Ahmed pleaded guilty to computer fraud in December 2023 and was sentenced on 12 April 2024 to three years in prison and three years of supervised release, ordered to forfeit approximately $12.3 million and to pay over $5 million in restitution to Nirvana and to the other exchange he attacked.
Sources
- U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New YorkPrimary · retrieved 2026-08-01
- CoinDeskSecondary · retrieved 2026-08-01
- Crypto BriefingSecondary · retrieved 2026-08-01
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