Ethereum Lender Term Finance Loses $8.5M in Governance Takeover
Term Finance, an Ethereum lending protocol, has suffered an $8.5 million loss in a governance takeover on Sunday.
An attacker quietly bought up TERM governance tokens, pushed through a vote, and took control of four of its five USDC strategy vaults and roughly 91% of its Ethereum Meta Vault.
No bug or exploit was involved; the attacker simply used the protocol as designed, leveraging the power of governance voting to seize control and drain vaults.
Security firms CertiK and PeckShield confirmed the outflow: about 2,843 ETH (worth close to $6.87 million) and 1.68 million USDC swapped into DAI shortly after.
This incident is not Term's first eight-figure scare; a similar incident occurred in May 2025 when the protocol lost approximately $1.5 million due to an oracle decimal mismatch during a routine upgrade.