Stream Finance halts activity after $93 million loss

The Stream Finance defi yield project announced that "an external fund manager overseeing Stream funds disclosed the loss of approximately $93 million in Stream fund assets." Stream announced that they were in the process of withdrawing remaining liquid assets, and had halted all deposits or withdrawals. They also announced they had retained a law firm to investigate the "incident".

The project didn't disclose who the fund manager was, or the circumstances in which the "loss" occurred.

The Staked Stream USD token depegged on November 3, and crashed further following the announcement.

Balancer exploited for at least $110 million

The defi protocol Balancer suffered a major exploit that drained over $110 million across several blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Base, and Sonic. Attackers exploited faulty access control in the manageUserBalance function of Balancer's v2 smart contract, enabling unauthorized internal withdrawals. The stolen tokens included 6,850 osETH, 6,590 wETH, and 4,260 wstETH, later consolidated into new wallets likely for laundering.

The exploit also impacted forked protocols like Beets Finance, which lost around $3 million. Balancer's BAL token dropped over 10% following the theft.

This was Balancer's third major security incident since 2020, despite prior audits by OpenZeppelin and Trail of Bits.

Garden hacked for $11 million

The Garden bitcoin bridge suffered a roughly $11 million loss after one of its solvers was compromised. These solvers essentially act as market makers for the protocol. Some blockchain sleuths have questioned whether the affected solver, which Garden described as a separate entity, may actually be operated by the same team as Garden.

There wasn't much sympathy to be had for Garden after this exploit. The protocol had recently announced hitting a milestone of bridging more than $2 billion in assets, but the celebration was criticized after zachxbt pointed out that a substantial portion of the bridged funds were proceeds of crimes being laundered to evade detection and recovery.

Cryptomus fined $127 million for compliance failures

The Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Cryptomus has been fined CA$177 million (US$127 million) by the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) for failing to report more than 1,000 suspicious transactions linked to darknet markets, distribution of child sex abuse material, fraud, ransomware, and sanctions evasion. It additionally failed to report more than 7,500 transactions originating from Iran, and more than 1,500 high-value transactions.

Cryptomus was temporarily banned from trading in British Columbia in May. The CA$177 million fine smashes Canada's previous record for the largest penalty they've ever imposed. That honor previously went to KuCoin, another crypto exchange fined CA$20 million (US$14.3 million) in September.

Fortress Trust is insolvent

Nevada's Financial Institutions Division has issued a cease and desist order against Fortress Trust, stating that the firm is "on the verge of insolvency". The company admits it "failed to safeguard assets under its custody and is unable to meet all customer withdrawals". The company has only around $1.3 million in actual assets in custody, while it owes customers around $12.3 million.

In 2023, Fortress experienced a $15 million theft. Though the company originally announced it would be acquired by Ripple, which had agreed to cover the shortfall, the deal eventually fell through. It's not clear how — or if — the funds were ever restored.

Fortress's insolvency has strong parallels to that of Prime Trust, another trust company that shares a founder in Scott Purcell. NFID issued a cease and desist to Prime Trust in June 2023 after finding the company was insolvent; in bankruptcy proceedings, that company later blamed much of the insolvency on losing access to a hardware wallet that held customer assets.

Paxos accidentally mints more than twice the global GDP in PayPal stablecoins

Paxos, the issuer of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin, accidentally minted 300 trillion of the supposedly dollar-pegged token. For context, this is approximately 2.5x the global GDP, and around 125x the total number of US dollars actually in circulation.

Paxos later announced that the mint was an "internal technical error", and that they had burned the excess tokens.

While PayPal promises its customers that "Reserves are held 100% in US dollar deposits, US treasuries and cash equivalents – meaning that customer funds are available for 1:1 redemption with Paxos," there clearly isn't much in the way of safeguards to ensure that is always the case. As with most stablecoin issuers, Paxos merely issues self-reported and unreviewed portfolio reports, and monthly third-party attestations (not audits) of reserves.

Hyperliquid user loses $21 million to private key leak

An attacker apparently obtained access to a victim's private key, enabling them to drain $21 million in various crypto assets. The attacker quickly bridged the stolen funds to ETH, then bounced through various addresses in hopes of disguising their origin and making the funds more challenging to recover.

Some originally feared that the theft was enabled by an exploit on Hyperliquid itself, shortly after another Hyperliquid-based project was compromised, but the theft appears to have been a key leak rather than an exploit on the protocol.

Abracadabra loses more "Magic Internet Money" to third hack in two years

In their third major hack in two years, the Abracadabra defi lending project lost $1.8 million of their Magic Internet Money stablecoin. An attacker took advantage of a bug in the project smart contracts to borrow more than their provided collateral would normally allow. The attack was funded via Tornado Cash, and the exploiter then swapped the stolen tokens for ETH and laundered them back through Tornado.

The project disclosed the theft, describing the exploit as affecting "some deprecated contracts". They downplayed the theft, saying they'd bought back the stolen assets using treasury funds.

Abracadabra previously suffered a $13 million theft in March 2025, and a $6.5 million theft in January 2024.

Futureverse announces restructuring two years after raising $54 million

In 2023, there was no shortage of buzzy press coverage for Futureverse, which promised to build a metaverse and gaming-focused blockchain. They partnered with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline to build the "Readyverse". They partnered with the estate of Muhammad Ali to build an "AI-powered" boxing game (with NFTs!) They partnered with Rebook to build a "virtual sneaker design experience", where customers could design sneakers to equip to their Fortnite or Roblox characters. That year, the company had raised $54 million in a Series A round led by 10T Holdings and Ripple Labs. They made even more money from token sales to retail investors.

As recently as this year, Futureverse was earning spots on "most innovative company" lists. In April, they announced they'd be acquiring Candy Digital, an NFT company created by Mike Novogratz, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others (which itself had raised a $100 million series A in 2021, and another funding round in 2023). "NFTs will be back in a big way one of these days", wrote Axios, covering the sale in April 2025.

But now, Futureverse has announced they've "made the difficult decision to begin a restructuring of the business". Focusing only on the AI portion of their business, and conspicuously omitting any mention of blockchains, NFTs, or metaverses, the company says they "recognize that adjustments are needed to ensure the long-term sustainability of our vision."

Futureverse locked comments on the post, likely to try to dodge angry community members who accused the company of stealing from them or rug-pulling.

Hyperdrive lending protocol exploited for $782,000

Exploiters drained $782,000 in crypto assets from two markets on the Hyperdrive lending protocol, which is built on the Hyperliquid layer-1 blockchain. The attacker apparently took advantage of a security flaw in one of the project's smart contracts to drain the funds.

Hyperdrive paused all markets while investigating the vulnerability, and patched the bug. They also compensated those who had lost money in the exploit.

Hypervault rug pulls for $3.6 million

Only days after the Hypervault yield farming platform announced on Twitter that they'd surpassed $5 million in total value locked, the platform suddenly shut down its website and social media accounts. Simultaneously, the crypto security firm PeckShield observed an "abnormal withdrawal" of a large quantity of various crypto assets priced at around $3.6 million, which were swapped to 752 ETH (~$3.1 million) and laundered through Tornado Cash.

The project had attracted customers by advertising yields of 76–95%.

SBI Crypto likely suffers $21 million theft

Crypto sleuth zachxbt observed $21 million in "suspicious outflows" from SBI Crypto, a crypto mining subsidiary of the Japanese SBI Group. The money was quickly laundered through instant exchanges and Tornado Cash, in ways zachxbt observed were similar to tactics of North Korean crypto thieves.

SBI Crypto has not made any public statements addressing the apparent theft.

Griffin AI exploited for $3 million one day after launch

One day after Griffin AI launched its GAIN token on Binance Alpha, an attacker minted 5 billion fake GAIN tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, then exploited a cross-chain endpoint to trick the bridge to the Binance chain into recognizing them as the real thing. The attacker was only able to sell a small fraction of their tokens, but they made off with approximately $3 million as the token plunged in price. According to CEO Oliver Feldmeier, the exploit was enabled by "a misconfigured layer Zero (cross-chain messaging) set-up and compromised key".

Griffin AI promises to allow customers to "build, deploy, and scale autonomous AI agents for crypto finance". These are essentially AI-powered bots that perform various functions — some of Griffin's advertised examples include a "robo-adviser" to provide "tailored investment strategies", and bots to do arbitrage trading or manage staked assets.

Seedify launchpad project suffers bridge exploit

An attacker exploited bridges for SFUND, the token issued by the Seedify launchpad and incubator. It appears the exploiter has profited around $1.7 million from the theft. Seedify issued a statement announcing the theft, and said the bridge contracts that were exploited had been deployed for three years. The SFUND token crashed in price by around 80% before recovering somewhat.

Seedify has been a launchpad for blockchain games, NFT projects, and other web3 products. The team recently has embraced "vibe coding" — a practice in which people rely heavily on AI to generate code.

UXLINK exploited for around $28 million, then hacker gets phished

The "AI-powered web3 social platform" UXLINK was exploited by an attacker that gained control of the project's multisignature wallet, then minted billions of the project's UXLINK token. Though the tokens were worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper, low liquidity and a crashing token price means the attacker cashed out around $28 million.

Shortly after the hack, the attacker apparently approved a phishing contract, perhaps in their rush to swap tokens before the price crashed further or before exchanges could freeze the tokens. Around 542 million of the UXLINK tokens were sent to a phishing address as a result, though it doesn't appear the phishing wallet has been able to sell the tokens.

Yala stablecoin depegs after $7.6 million theft

The YU bitcoin-backed stablecoin lost its intended dollar peg after what they described as "an attempted attack", later writing that there was an "unauthorized transfer of funds". Although they initially wrote that "All funds are safe", they later stated that they "identified the stolen assets on-chain and are actively working with law enforcement to pursue recovery." Research firm Lookonchain observed a large mint of the YU token that may have been related — if so, the attacker successfully stole at least 1,501 ETH ($6.75 million), and holds a substantial quantity of YU they still haven't sold.

Despite the project's attempted reassurances, the YU stablecoin lost its $1 peg, plummeting as low as around $0.20. As of writing, about a day later, the stablecoin is still well below its peg, at around $0.94.

Shibarium bridge hit with $2.4 million flash loan attack

A bridge for Shibarium, the layer-2 network for the Shiba Inu project, was exploited for approximately $2.4 million in funds. The attacker bought 4.6 million BONE tokens (the governance token for Shibarium) using a flash loan, then used compromised validator signing keys to take control of the majority of validator power. Then, they used that control to drain around 225 ETH and 92.6 billion SHIB, together priced at around $2.4 million at the time of the theft.

The project has paused staking on the network, freezing the BONE tokens borrowed by the attacker, which may limit the attacker's profits.