Raydium Suffers $2m Hack
- Raydium enables users to trade different cryptocurrencies without needing an intermediary.
- The entire Solana ecosystem has suffered greatly from its ties with FTX and Alameda Research.
- Raydium has not yet announced any compensation package for victims of the attack.
Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX), Raydium, suffered a hack of over $2 million on Friday. The platform shared the news on its Twitter page, revealing that the hack took place after the attacker gained control over the account of the exchange’s owner. Raydium wrote that “authority has been halted on AMM & farm programs for now,” adding that the investigation was ongoing.
The attacker has reportedly been able to move $2 million worth of different cryptocurrencies from Raydium exchange pools. ZachXBT, a researcher on Twitter, claimed the attacker had “so far” bridged $2 million to Ethereum.
The Prism development team seems to have made the initial discovery of the exploit. They published a notice informing users that an attacker was exploiting Raydium and draining liquidity without first depositing and then burning LP tokens. The team urged its users to remove their Prism and USDC tokens from Raydium.
Additionally, Ottersec, a crypto auditing company, claims that the attacker siphoned funds by using the contract’s withdraw pnl function, which the developer uses to withdraw fees. The company did not specify whether this feature could be used to remove all liquidity from the pools or only a small portion of it.
Raydium is one of the top platforms in Solana’s troubled decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. The exchange enables users to trade between various cryptocurrencies without the use of a middleman. Solana, with its native asset and DeFi community, has not fared well during this crypto bear market. SOL has dropped significantly from the top ten cryptocurrency rankings as a result of the failure of FTX and Alameda Research, two companies that had strong ties with Solana.
Raydium has not yet announced any compensation package for affected users, but the attack nonetheless adds to the pile of issues facing the crypto industry. Aside from the FTX collapse, crypto-related hacks have been a huge plague for the industry. Interestingly, DeFi platforms have been easy targets for hackers.
Statistics show that more than $1 billion has been stolen from crypto platforms in 2022 alone, with October and November notorious for multiple attacks. Recently, the crypto industry has experienced a recurrent issue with admin account hacks.
The deployer key for the Ankr protocol was stolen on December 2, and the attacker used it to withdraw $5 million worth of BNB. Additionally, the Ronin network bridge was compromised earlier this year using a similar technique. In one instance, the perpetrator escaped with cryptocurrency loot worth over $600 million.
Lawrence has covered some exciting stories in his career as a journalist, he finds blockchain-related stories very intriguing. He believes Web3 will change the world and wants everyone to be a part of it.
