Bunni DEX Shuts Down After $8.4M Exploit, Citing Lack of Funds for Relaunch

Decentralized exchange Bunni has officially announced that it will shut down operations following an $8.4 million exploit in early September, becoming the second crypto project to fold this week amid a wave of setbacks across the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector.

In an X post on Thursday, the Bunni team said it could not continue operating due to a shortage of funds needed to rebuild and secure the platform.

“The recent exploit has forced Bunni’s growth to a halt, and in order to securely relaunch we’d need to pay 6-7 figures in audit & monitoring expenses alone – requiring capital that we simply don’t have,” the team wrote.

Bunni Exploit Drains $8.4M Across Ethereum and Unichain

The exploit, drained $8.4 million across Ethereum and layer-2 network Unichain, prompting an immediate halt to operations.

A subsequent blog post on September 4 confirmed that attackers had taken advantage of vulnerabilities within the protocol’s codebase. Bunni aimed to optimize returns for liquidity providers through a custom system known as the Liquidity Distribution Function.

Before the exploit, the protocol had seen explosive growth. Its total value locked (TVL) jumped from $2.23 million in June to nearly $80 million by mid-August.

While Bunni will no longer operate, the team has open-sourced its Bunni v2 smart contracts, relicensing them from Business Source License (BSL) to the MIT License.

The move allows developers to freely integrate Bunni’s innovations, including liquidity distribution functions, surge fees, and autonomous rebalancing, into new DeFi projects.

The decision drew praise from parts of the community for preserving the project’s technical contributions.

Users will still be able to withdraw assets through the Bunni website until further notice, and remaining treasury assets will be distributed to BUNNI, LIT, and veBUNNI tokenholders once legal approvals are secured.

Team members will not receive any portion of these funds. The team added that it continues to cooperate with law enforcement to recover the stolen funds.