This led some to question how decentralized the project truly is if the funds can be frozen in such a way.
Cetus DEX exploited for $223 million; some funds "paused"
An attacker stole $223 million from the Sui-based Cetus Protocol. The project announced shortly after that $162 million of the funds had been frozen, leaving around $61 million unaccounted for.
Curve Finance website and Twitter account hacked
The website and Twitter accounts belonging to the Curve Finance defi projects were compromised in quick succession. On May 5, an attacker compromised the Twitter account belonging to the project, posting a scam in which they appeared to announce an airdrop.
Then, on May 12, the project posted a warning that the website for the Curve frontend was "hijacked" in an apparent domain takeover.
This is not the first such compromise for Curve, which suffered a frontend compromise in August 2022 that resulted in $620,000 in losses (later recovered with the help of some exchanges).
Founder of Zerebro token fakes his death, promotes new "legacy" coin
On May 4, 22-year-old Zerebro founder Jeffy Yu published a blog post introducing "legacoins" — a version of memecoins he said would be used to "define the legacy" of those who had died. Several days later, Yu's Twitter account announced that a "deadman's switch" had triggered the launch of his own "legacoin", $LLJEEFFY. Elsewhere, a video appeared to record Yu's suicide, and an obituary describing him as a "martyr of imagination and creativity" appeared on Legacy.com.
It wasn't long, however, before people began to speculate that Yu had faked his death. Wonderland CEO Daniele Sestagalli published a letter he said he had privately received from Yu, where he confessed to faking his death and described it as his "only viable exit from persistent harassment, blackmail, and threats". Others noted that wallets belonging to Yu had been cashing out $ZEREBRO tokens priced at around $1.3 million.
Reporters from the San Francisco Standard ultimately located Yu at his parents' house, where he was "agitated and shocked that he had been found after some routine internet searches", and "declined to talk about the false report of his death or how he may have benefited financially from it."
- "A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house", San Francisco Standard [archive]
- Tweet thread by Lookonchain [archive]
Bitget accuses "professional arbitrage" group of profiting $20 million from VOXEL market manipulation
After trading — and prices — surged in Bitget's market for the thinly traded video game token VOXEL, the company has accused a "professional arbitrage" group of "improperly" profiting $20 million from manipulating the market. A Bitget executive stated on Twitter that they had issued legal demands to eight accounts they said were responsible for "instigating" the unusual trading activity.
$330 million in Bitcoin apparently stolen; laundering spikes Monero price by over 40%
3,250 BTC (~$330 million) were apparently stolen from a bitcoin holder and then quickly moved through multiple exchanges and swapped for the Monero privacycoin. Such a massive swap into Monero was apparently enough to cause the Monero price to spike from around $230 to as high as around $330, before retracting somewhat.
Term Finance loses $1.65 million due to misconfiguration, recovers $1 million
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).
Loopscale hacked for $5.8 million two weeks after launch
A new Solana-based defi protocol called Loopscale, backed by Coinbase Ventures and Solana Labs, suffered a $5.8 million exploit only two weeks after its launch. The stolen funds represented 12% of the protocol's TVL. The project blamed the exploit on a bug in the protocol's pricing calculations. Although the project had been audited in February by OShield, the audit evidently did not detect the flaw.
$5 million in tokens stolen from ZKsync
An attacker compromised an admin account belonging to the ZKsync Ethereum layer-2 project, which is built by Matter Labs. By doing so, they were able to steal approximately $5 million worth of the ZK token, which the project said were "the remaining unclaimed tokens from the ZKsync airdrop".
ZK Sync offered a 10% "bug bounty" to the thief, who accepted and returned 90% of the stolen funds.
KiloEx exploited for $7.5 million
KiloEx, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, was exploited for $7.5 million. An attacker executed an oracle manipulation attack on KiloEx's pricing smart contracts to steal funds across the Base Ethereum layer-2 chain, BNB Chain, and Taiko.
KiloEx halted trading on the platform while investigating the exploit, and contacted the hacker to try to negotiate a 90% return of funds.
KiloEx later announced that the recovery had been successful, and that they would pay out the 10% "bounty".
Mantra token price suddenly collapses by 90%
Mantra's $OM token price suddenly crashed by around 90%, with the project's supposed "market cap" shrinking by around $5 billion in the span of hours. Mantra is a layer-1 blockchain project aiming to support real-world asset trading.
Some have accused Mantra of rug-pulling or accused Mantra investors like Laser Digital of mass sell-offs. However, Mantra claims that the flash crash was due to "reckless forced closures initiated by centralized exchanges on OM account holders" — a claim that has been questioned by those observing the rapidity of the crash.
FDUSD depegs
The stablecoin issued by First Digital, FDUSD, has lost its $1 peg and sunk as low as $0.76 before returning to around $0.97 — which, in stablecoin world, is still a substantial de-peg. The drop followed concerns about First Digital's reserves amid reports that some of the assets used to back the stablecoin were trapped in investments that couldn't be liquidated.
The rumor has been amplified by Tron founder Justin Sun, who tweeted: "First Digital Trust (FDT) is effectively insolvent and unable to fulfill client fund redemptions. I strongly recommend that users take immediate action to secure their assets." First Digital responded by insisting they were solvent, and denounced Sun's comments as "a typical Justin Sun smear campaign to try to attack a competitor to his business".
zkLend thief gets robbed
The zkLend lending platform was hoping they could secure the return of stolen funds from the attacker who stole 3,667 ETH (~$9.5 million at the time) from the platform in mid-February. They offered a 10% "bounty" for the return of the funds, but received no reply — that is, until now.
On March 31, the attacker sent an on-chain message to the platform, writing: "Hello I tried to move funds to tornado but I used a phishing website and all the funds have been lost. I am devastated. I am terribly sorry for all the havoc and losses caused. All the 2930 eth have been taken by that site owners. I do not have coins. Please redirect your efforts towards those site owners to see if you can recover some of the money. I am sorry."
The zkLend project instructed the thief to return any remaining funds to their wallets, though no such transfer has happened yet.
There has been substantial conversation over whether the hacker had truly been in turn scammed out of the stolen funds, had made up a fake phishing site to try to obscure the path of stolen money, or perhaps whether the whole event had been an April Fools' joke. However, zkLend noted on Twitter that the phishing website, which imitates the Tornado Cash platform, has been operational for five years and is likely not connected to the hacker.
- On-chain messages between zkLend and thief
- Tweet by zkLend [archive]
ICERAID crypto project claims to pay people to report immigrants and "terrorist" judges to law enforcement
A project called "ICERAID" has emerged, promising to reward "intelligence gathering" on "suspicious activities" by photographing supposedly criminal behavior by undocumented immigrants to law enforcement. The project has been advertised by right wing personalities including Laura Loomer and Matt Gaetz, the latter of whom promised ICERAID lets people "ping the cops faster than you can say 'sanctuary city'."
An instructional video posted to social media by the platform encourages people to "do [their] patriotic duty" by going to a District Court in a blue state, then "Secretly snap a photo of the judge. Don't let the bailiff see you." The video shows a person uploading a photograph of Judge James Boasberg, who is presiding over the Trump administration deportation flights case, and reporting him for "terrorism".
The project has been likened to Stasi programs in which citizens were paid to spy and report on their neighbors.
The founder of ICERAID, Jason Meyers, claims that he had had conversations with the White House about the project, although the website for the tool states it is not affiliated with any government agency and is not a website of the US government. Meyers has faced several enforcement actions resulting in disciplinary penalties over his involvement in security sales, and in 2014 was permanently banned by FINRA from broker-dealer activities after misappropriating investor funds. Meanwhile, multiple users have complained about not receiving their promised ICERAID tokens, and the project reportedly changed its terms after the token presale to reduce the amount of money buyers would earn for participating.