Kava Lend exploited for $3.7M, KAVA falls 40%

Attackers exploited an arithmetic flaw in the Kava Lend money market on November 14 and drained about 53.9M KAVA — roughly $3.7M before the price collapsed, according to DefiLlama. The token fell more than 40% within the first hour.

Details

DefiLlama says the error in the BUSD market inflated the supply interest index about 243,000-fold, letting the attackers borrow KAVA repeatedly against inflated collateral. Much of the stolen KAVA was bridged to BNB Chain and sold; roughly 612,000 USDT of proceeds was blocked at the Relay bridge.

Kava said the incident was isolated to Kava Lend and was not an infinite mint of KAVA (TokenPost). The Axelar bridge was paused, Upbit, Bithumb and Coinone halted KAVA deposits and withdrawals, and Upbit put the token on a delisting watchlist (Crypto Briefing). The price dropped from about $0.068 to $0.041.

How the exploit worked

The attackers took advantage of an extremely small effective supply in the BUSD market: with that denominator, the interest index jumped about 243,000-fold and deposits turned into outsized collateral claims. They borrowed KAVA against them, then liquidated the loans in a way that erased the debt without recovering enough collateral (DefiLlama). Crypto Briefing puts the amount bridged to BNB Chain at roughly 48M KAVA (Crypto Briefing); the sources differ slightly on the volume.

What it means for the market

The $3.7M loss is modest, but the token took a bigger hit: KAVA lost more than 40%, and Korean exchanges halted transfers, which limits liquidity. The team has promised a full incident report once its investigation ends; whether users will be compensated is not yet known. The episode does not touch the bitcoin market: see the daily brief for the live BTC price and the Kava coin page for the token. This is not investment advice.

Full timeline — in our explainer.