Bancor, a 5 month old platform designed to make it easier for users to launch their own blockchain tokens raised a record $144M within a few hours last week through an ICO. In this post the Hacking, Distributed blog points out 29 reasons why Bancor is flawed.
In this post, we want to quickly make the case that their approach is flawed. To recap, they propose a scheme to provide liquidity for digital assets, using a smart contract. In essence, they propose a public algorithm by which they can always propose a bid/ask price for other people's coins. Now, a flawed approach doesn't mean that what they have is exploitable the way The DAO was, though we detail some immediate problems with the code below. What we mean is that the contract, as implemented, is far from meeting its purported narrative, even if no one takes advantage of the exploit.