San Francisco, Apr 19 (IANS): Hackers have stolen nearly $180 million in cryptocurrency from Beanstalk Farms, a decentralised finance (De-Fi) project.

Beanstalk operates a system where participants earn rewards by contributing funds to a central funding pool that is used to balance the value of one token at close to $1, reports The Verge.

"Beanstalk suffered an exploit. The Beanstalk Farms team is investigating the attack and will make an announcement to the community as soon as possible," the company admitted in a tweet.

The hackers exploited Beanstalk's majority vote governance system, a core feature of many DeFi protocols.

The attack was first spotted by blockchain analytics company PeckShield.

The Beanstalk attacker "used a flash loan obtained through the decentralised protocol Aave to borrow close to $1 billion in cryptocurrency assets and exchanged these for enough beans to gain a 67 per cent voting stake in the project".

The attacker then instantly repaid the flash loan, netting an $80 million profit, the report said.

In January this year, hackers stole crypto tokens worth $120 million from Blockchain-based decentralised finance (DeFi) platform BadgerDAO. Several crypto wallets were drained before the platform could stop the cyber attack.

In December last year, cyber criminals stole cryptocurrency worth $80 million from Qubit Finance, a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform.

The US this week blamed North Korean hacker group Lazarus for stealing $625 million in cryptocurrency from the Ronin Network, owned by developer group Sky Mavis.