The MAMO post-mortem on Moonwell's forum puts residual debt at $9.13m
The $8.7m the trackers reported matches the stablecoins the post-mortem traces off Base. What a forensic report published on the protocol's forum a day later adds is a different number: $9.13m of borrower obligations still outstanding. The mechanism is not a vote and not a broken contract, but a donation to a market contract and a price feed that believed it.
By Staff, Lend Ledger
A lending market does not need broken code to give its money away. It needs one collateral asset whose price can be moved and a rule that believes it. A depositor’s balance sits behind that rule.
That is what happened to Moonwell’s MAMO market on Base on 27 August.
The figure searches return, and what it is not
Wire coverage that day put the loss near $8.7 million, an estimate crypto.news attributed to PeckShield and CertiK; PeckShield said the proceeds were consolidated into DAI at one address.
The post-mortem published on Moonwell’s governance forum on 28 August does not overturn it. Anthias Labs, the risk firm that publishes Moonwell’s reserve recommendations, posted it, and it traces 8,729,453.83 USDC burned on Base and 8,728,318.99 received on Ethereum, converted to DAI in one account.
What it adds are different quantities: $11,028,761.70 borrowed in total at oracle prices, about $6.78 million as the traced rise in the actor’s stablecoin balance, and roughly $9.131 million of borrower obligations left on Moonwell’s oracle basis, Anthias’s best estimate of residual and potential bad debt.
It does not say who carries that debt, and we will not guess: a figure on a protocol’s books is not a depositor loss.
Not the failure we covered on 24 August
Six days ago this desk reported a drain that ran through a governance vote. Nobody voted here, and nothing broke: the permissions held, the collateral accounting did not.
Per the post-mortem, three things combined. An account supplied 15,089,595 MAMO and received mMAMO shares, then sent a further 53,393,290 MAMO straight into the mMAMO contract without minting against it, a transfer the supply cap never sees, lifting the exchange rate roughly 3.68x. The principal and one linked account bought 94,305,863 MAMO between them across DEXs as the MAMO/USD source feed moved from about $0.010597 to $0.43127363. At that price the 50 per cent collateral factor gave $11.97 million of nominal borrowing capacity.
The machinery worked, and arrived second
Liquidation opened at 09:30:45 UTC, thirty-two seconds after the final borrow. Liquidators repaid 215,841 USDC, 17.761 cbBTC, 38.573 WETH and 25.308 wstETH and seized 735,602,421 mMAMO, shares by then worth what MAMO had always been worth.
The manual response was slower: borrow caps to 1 wei at 10:53:43, the MAMO supply cap at 11:09:43. Re-read on 29 August, the thread still holds a single post: no remediation timeline, no compensation plan, no confirmation of the caps since.
The listing decision is what to take from this. A thin token, a feed reading its market price, share accounting a plain transfer can inflate: together they sized the hole in advance.
Read this as a record of what one risk firm reconstructed on-chain, not a view on Moonwell’s finances or a reason to put money anywhere. A deposit in a market like this can go to zero.