WEB3-DMM-BITCOIN-2024

On 1 April 2026, attackers drained about $285 million from Drift, the largest perpetual-futures exchange on Solana, in roughly twelve minutes, more than half of everything the protocol held. There was no smart-contract bug. The contracts worked exactly as written. The attackers, later tied to North Korea's Lazarus operations, spent months socially engineering the people with privileged access, then abused a Solana feature called durable nonces to get the protocol's multisig signers to approve, in advance and without realising it, the transactions that handed over control. Once they had admin rights they whitelisted a worthless token as collateral, deposited a pile of it, and borrowed out the real money. It is the case that proves the modern crypto heist is an operations and social-engineering problem, not a Solidity one.

On July 18, 2024 Indian exchange WazirX lost approximately $230M (about $234.9M) from a Safe (Gnosis) 4-of-6 multisig wallet held under a custody arrangement with Liminal (five WazirX keys plus one Liminal key). The attack was a blind-signing exploit: signers reviewed benign transaction details in the manipulated Liminal interface while the payload actually signed differed, authorizing a delegatecall (function selector 0x804e1f0a) that overwrote slot0 of the Safe proxy and repointed its implementation to an attacker-controlled contract (0xef279c2ab14960aa319008cbea384b9f8ac35fc6). Once the proxy pointed to attacker logic the wallet was fully controlled without further keys, and it was drained. The theft was attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group, later confirmed in a joint statement by the US, South Korea and Japan in January 2025. Funds were laundered via Tornado Cash; victims are being repaid through a court-approved restructuring (resumed October 2025, BitGo custody) rather than direct recovery.

On 14 December 2023, hundreds of popular crypto websites, including SushiSwap and Zapper, suddenly started trying to empty their visitors' wallets, all at once, and none of them had been hacked directly. The poison was in a shared ingredient: Ledger's Connect Kit, a tiny library that thousands of decentralized apps load to let users connect their wallets. An attacker who phished a former Ledger employee published a malicious version, and because most of those apps loaded the library live from a CDN rather than a pinned copy, the bad code reached every visitor within minutes. It is the lesson that loading code live from a third party means inheriting that third party's worst day, instantly and everywhere.

On June 24, 2022, Harmony's Horizon bridge was exploited for approximately $99.7 million. The Ethereum-side bridge was secured by a 5-validator multisig configured at a low 2-of-5 threshold, so compromising just two keys gave full control of the funds. Per Harmony's post-mortem the private keys were not stored in plaintext but were doubly encrypted via a passphrase and a key management service, with no single machine holding multiple plaintext keys; the attacker nonetheless breached Harmony's hot signing infrastructure and was able to access and decrypt several keys, including those used to sign the unauthorized transfers, because the decryption capability lived within reach of the compromised environment. With two decrypted keys meeting the threshold, the attacker signed and confirmed the drain across 11 transactions (the 2 refers to the signature threshold, not the transaction count). The FBI and Elliptic attributed the theft to North Korea's Lazarus Group (APT38); the stolen assets were swapped to Ether and laundered through Tornado Cash and later RAILGUN.

Signature replay occurs when a signed message lacks binding context (nonce, chainId, or an EIP-712 domain separator), so a signature valid for one execution can be re-submitted on another call or another EVM chain. The canonical 2022 case is the Optimism/Wintermute loss of 20,000,000 OP tokens disclosed June 9, 2022: Wintermute provided a Gnosis Safe address deployed on Ethereum mainnet but not on Optimism. Because the Gnosis Safe factory's original deployment transaction used a pre-EIP-155 signature, its hash covered only six RLP fields (nonce, gasPrice, gas, to, value, data) and omitted chainId, so anyone could rebroadcast the identical signed transaction on Optimism. An attacker replayed that deployment to recreate the factory and Safe at the same counterfactual address on L2, gained control of the contract account before the rightful owners, and swept the 20M OP. The same low-level flaw appears in application contracts that ecrecover a digest missing nonce/chainId, letting one signed approval be replayed repeatedly.

On April 18, 2026, North Korea's Lazarus Group drained about 116,500 rsETH (roughly $292 million) from KelpDAO's LayerZero-based bridge, the largest DeFi exploit of the year. No smart contract was broken; the contracts did exactly what they were written to do. The attack was against the bridge's off-chain verification. rsETH's LayerZero channel was configured to trust a single verifier (a 1-of-1 DVN), so the attackers compromised LayerZero's internal RPC nodes, knocked out the honest external node with a denial-of-service flood, and forced that single verifier to attest to a cross-chain message that never really happened. The Ethereum side then released unbacked rsETH from escrow, leaving wrapped rsETH stranded across more than twenty chains and triggering a bank-run across DeFi.