DeFi Projects Hit for Over $11 Million in 24-Hour Hack Wave
Crypto and DeFi projects continue to be hacked at an alarming rate, with few days going by without incident.
Last Thursday was a particularly busy day, with three projects falling victim to exploits in just 24 hours. The total losses came out to over $11 million.
The first to be hit was Payy Network, a rollup that offers on-chain payroll and treasury services. Its bridge connecting it to Ethereum was exploited, draining the entire balance of its bridge and resulting in losses of $1.8 million.
Specter, an on-chain investigator, first flagged suspicious withdrawals via Telegram. The attacker used privacy protocol Railgun to swap USDC for ETH. Payy Network confirmed the exploit and paused all operations, citing that the funds were 'users' non-custodial deposits' but has yet to disclose the cause of the loss.
Duelbits, a crypto casino and sports betting platform, was next up in a suspected private key compromise. Initially estimated losses came out to $4.3 million by PeckShield, but Specter later raised this figure to $5.9 million after identifying affected addresses on Bitcoin and Solana.
Meter.io, an EVM blockchain, fell victim to a bridge attack as well. This time, unbacked tokens were minted instead of existing deposits being drained. The team pointed to a 'block validation flaw' and informed users that the mainnet and the bridge are paused until further notice.