PANews reported on March 16th that, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, a wallet named "0x7a7," which received 7,447 ETH (US$16.29 million) from Tornado Cash, is suspected of being behind the CAKE/THE liquidation cascade event on the Venus Protocol. The attackers used this ETH as collateral to deposit into Aave, borrowing US$9.92 million in stablecoins; they then accumulated THE tokens and allegedly manipulated its price on centralized exchanges; next, they deposited 36.1 million THE tokens into Venus and lent out assets such as BTC, BNB, and CAKE; approximately 40 minutes later, the price of THE plummeted, triggering a chain of liquidations.

Ultimately, Venus Protocol incurred $2.15 million in bad debt (with 1.18 million CAKE and 1.84 million THE still outstanding); the attackers extracted approximately $5.07 million in assets from this. Their true profits likely came from short positions opened on centralized exchanges during the price crash.