Bitcoin ether and other major tokens slipped early Monday, extending a bruising November close amid fresh panic from DeFi platform Yearn Finance.
BTC, the top cryptocurrency by market value, fell more than 3% to nearly $87,000 in early Asian trading hours. Ethereum’s native token ETH fell 5%, while SOL, DOGE and XRP fell more than 4%, according to CoinDesk data.
The sell-off accelerated hours after Yearn’s X alert reported an “incident” in the yETH liquidity pool while mentioning that its V2 and V3 vaults remained secure and unaffected.
Discussions on social media suggest that the attacker exploited a vulnerability to create large amounts of yETH in a single transaction, thereby draining the liquidity pool and making off with around 1,000 ETH ($3 million), which was routed through mixers. YETH is a user-managed liquidity pool token composed of various Ethereum Liquid Staking (LST) derivatives.
Yearn’s issue comes days after major Korean exchange Upbit suffered a multimillion-dollar hack and highlights how institutional flows have inflated crypto market valuations without strengthening security infrastructure.
The sell-off at the start of the Asian session triggered liquidations exceeding $400 million in leveraged crypto futures, mainly affecting long positions, according to data source Coinglass. This indicates that many traders were betting on a price rebound and were caught off guard by the sudden downturn.
Bitcoin ended November (UTC) with a 17.5% loss, its largest since March, even though prices rose from near $80,000 to over $90,000 in the last week of the month. Ether fell 22%, recording its worst performance since February.
This poor performance came as institutional demand weakened significantly. U.S.-listed spot BTC ETFs lost $3.48 billion in net outflows in November, the second-largest buyback on record, according to data source SoSoValue. Ether ETFs lost a record $1.42 billion in outflows.
01:29 UTC: Adds commentary on liquidations, November performance and ETFs.
