The Essence of Flash Loan Attacks: Is It Actually Oracle Attacks?

Author | Adelyn Zhou Since the beginning of this year, the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has rapidly developed to over $12 billion in total value locked. With such exponential growth, malicious actors have increased motivation to manipulate and attack vulnerable DeFi protocols, often at the expense of ordinary users. One of the tools recently used in many DeFi attacks is flash loans—a new type of financial primitive that allows users to take out unsecured loans, with the only condition being that the loan must be repaid within the same block, otherwise it will be revoked.