Cosmos Hacker's $50M Heist Foiled by Decentralized Exchange Slippage

A hacker exploited a vulnerability in the Cosmos EVM to move $50 million of Nesa (NES) off the project's chain.

The attacker, who was funded through Monero (XMR), first bought $250,000 of NES and bridged the tokens to Nesa Chain. The hacker then exploited the bug, inflating that balance by 200 times before bridging roughly $50 million of NES back to Ethereum (ETH).

The stolen funds were moved through eight addresses, with the attacker swapping NES for ETH on decentralized exchanges before routing proceeds to centralized platforms.

However, liquidity vanished from the pools before most of the selling happened, resulting in extreme slippage that swallowed almost the entire position. The hacker recovered $60,000 against $50 million stolen.