Web3 is Going Just Great

July 10, 2025

Kinto token crashes; community claims rug pull, Kinto claims hack

The price of Kinto's $K token suddenly crashed 90%, sparking accusations of a rug pull. A tranche of investor tokens had just been unlocked recently, leading some to speculate that investors dumped their tokens on retail buyers.

However, Kinto blamed the token crash on the exploit that was recently disclosed by VennBuild, claiming on Twitter that "we got hacked by a state actor". Venn seemed to corroborate Kinto's explanation that the crash was related to the exploit, tweeting that although they had tried to warn all vulnerable projects before publicly disclosing the bug, "Sadly the Kinto token was not found despite being vulnerable, and exploited without time to mitigate."

Kinto has announced a plan to try to fundraise to cover a $1.4 million loss in liquidity, then create a new $K token based on a snapshot of previous token holdings.

July 9, 2025

Security researchers disclose exploit that put over $10 million across multiple protocols at risk

On July 9, security researchers at VennBuild and other firms disclosed a "critical backdoor" affecting thousands of smart contracts, which one of the researchers said left "over $10,000,000 at risk for months". The researchers suggested that the backdoor was likely created by Lazarus, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group.

According to the researchers, they found thousands of contracts affected by the exploit, and worked with multiple protocols to upgrade contracts or withdraw vulnerable funds. The researchers theorized that the attackers were "likely a sophisticated group waiting for a bigger target, not small wins."

Tweet thread by deeberiroz [archive]

April 26, 2025

Term Finance loses $1.65 million due to misconfiguration, recovers $1 million

(attribution)

The Ethereum-based lending project Term Finance lost $1.6 million when an oracle misconfiguration resulted in unintended liquidations. The team later announced that they had "successfully negotiated [the] return" of 333 ETH (~$600,000) that had been lost, and that another roughly 223 ETH (~$400,000) had been "captured internally", leaving the final loss at around 362 ETH (~$650,000).

Tweet by Term Labs [archive]

March 25, 2025

Abracadabra loses $13 million in "Magic Internet Money"

(attribution)

An attacker using a flash loan attack stole $13 million in the Magic Internet Money token from the Abracadabra project. The attack was enabled by a bug in the platform's smart contracts, and the hacker ultimately made off with around 6,262 ETH.

This is the second time Abracadabra has been exploited, after suffering a $6.5 million theft in January 2024.

"Hacker steals $13 million in Abracadabra's 'Magic Internet Money' seemingly using a flash loan attack", The Block

March 5, 2025

1inch loses $5 million to smart contract bug

(attribution)

An attacker exploited a smart contract belonging to the 1inch DEX aggregator, stealing $5 million in the USDC stablecoin and wETH. According to the platform, the vulnerability existed in "smart contracts using the obsolete Fusion v1 implementation", and the stolen funds belonged to resolvers (that is, entities that fulfill 1inch orders) rather than users.

January 12, 2025

UniLend exploited for almost $200,000

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The UniLend project, which advertises itself as a "unified platform for all things AI and defi", was exploited for almost $200,000. An attacker was able to take advantage of a bug in a smart contract that handled token redemption.

UniLend acknowledged the hack, downplaying it as affecting "only" 4% of the platform's $4.7 million TVL. They offered a bounty to the attacker.

December 10, 2024

Alpaca Finance proposes $50,000 restitution for $2.8 million in losses

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Users of the Alpaca Finance lending protocol suffered losses when the protocol's sloppy oracle implementation finally resulted in consequences. Although many had warned the project about their glacial oracle setup, and the vulnerabilities they were opening themselves up to, the project repeatedly denied any issues and even banned those voicing concerns.

Then, when a new token called THENA was listed on Binance and experienced major volatility as trading opened, Alpaca's issues came to a head. As the token price surged, the slow oracle failed to reflect price changes, allowing people to withdraw far more THENA than they had posted as collateral. THENA lenders have lost an estimated $2.8 million.

On December 10, Alpaca Finance proposed distributing $50,000 "saved" by their liquidation bot to the lenders who had lost funds. Alpaca Finance also banned users complaining about their losses in the project Discord, dismissing them as a "group bot/FUD attack".

September 27, 2024

Bedrock staking platform loses $2 million after bug that allowed users to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum 1:1

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A staking platform called Bedrock lost around $2 million after exploiters discovered a bug that allowed them to swap 1 ETH for 1 BTC despite the more than $63,000 difference in prices for the two assets.

A security firm working with Bedrock had tried to warn Bedrock of the vulnerability several hours before the attack, but the team was asleep. The vulnerable contracts had been deployed a day and a half prior to the attack, and had not been audited.

Fortunately for Bedrock, security groups were able to pause third-party projects surrounding Bedrock, which helped to limit the losses — which ultimately could have been as high as the entire value of funds on the protocol.

"Staking Protocol Bug Let Users Swap One Bitcoin for One Ethereum", Decrypt [archive]

September 20, 2024

Shezmu hacked for almost $5 million, negotiates bounty

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A crypto yield platform called Shezmu suffered a loss of around $4.9 million in $ShezUSD after an attacker exploited a flaw that allowed anyone to mint collateral, which they could then use to borrow ShezUSD. These tokens were relatively illiquid, however, so the total amount the attacker could have obtained was likely considerably less.

Shortly after the attack, Shezmu offered a 10% "bounty" for the return of the funds. The attacker responded that they would only consider a 20% bounty. Shezmu agreed to the terms, and announced to their followers that they had achieved a recovery from the "white hat" hacker.

"Crypto lender Shezmu recovers hacked funds through negotiation", Cointelegraph [archive]

August 6, 2024

$12 million taken by whitehats from Ronin bridge

(attribution)

The Ronin bridge, which bridges crypto assets to the Ronin Network used by Axie Infinity and other gaming projects, has once again suffered a breach — though a considerably smaller one than the recordbreaking $625 million theft in March 2022. An update to the bridge code introduced a flaw with respect to how transactions were confirmed.

Fortunately for the Ronin team, it seems that most of the losses actually went to whitehats and MEV bots that were frontrunning transactions by would-be exploiters. ETH and USDC priced at around $12 million were taken — the maximum amount before triggering a safety feature in the code. Later that day, Ronin announced that the ETH (worth around $10 million) had been returned, and that the USDC was in the process of being returned. They also announced that they would reward the whitehats with a $500,000 bug bounty reward.

The Ronin bridge was taken offline shortly after the flaw was detected, and the team announced it would undergo an audit before being brought back online.