Solana Protocol Raydium Hacked for $2 Million

Raydium – a Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) – was hacked for over $2 million on Friday. 

According to Raydium, the hacker appears to have taken control of the exchange’s admin address to carry out the attack. 

Over $2 Million Lost

Raydium acknowledged the hack over Twitter, noting that investigations were still ongoing. 

It provided a link to the attacker’s account, which appears to hold $1.45 million worth of Solana-based tokens at writing time. Solscan shows that this balance is mostly comprised of SOL ($1.4 million) and SPL tokens ($44,000).

“Initial understanding is owner authority was overtaken by the attacker, but the authority has been halted on AMM & farm programs for now,” said Raydium. 

Arkham, a crypto-intelligence provider, stated earlier that the Solana account had already drained multiple liquidity pools on Raydium. It recommended withdrawing funds from Raydium as soon as possible.

But that’s not the whole story: investigating the matter, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT added that about $2 million in funds have already been bridged to Ethereum. Those funds were then quickly deposited into Tornado Cash – a crypto privacy mixer that was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in August. 

ZachXBT’s finding has been corroborated by Nansen, which noted that $2.2 million in tokens, including $1.6 million in SOL, were withdrawn from Raydium by the hacker.

DeFiLlama shows that $35 million in funds still remain on the DEX. 

Solana’s Woes

The crypto bear market has not been kind to Solana, including both its native asset and defi ecosystem. 

The collapse of FTX and Alameda Research – two firms that were bullish supporters of the network – has seen SOL fall well away from crypto’s top ten. The token is worth just $12 at writing time, compared to $36 on November 5th prior to FTX’s liquidity crunch. 

Meanwhile, Serum – another Solana-based DEX – has been forced to start anew, as its own validator key was compromised when FTX went down. The new protocol – Openbooks – is supposed to be community driven. 

The fallout also caused Serum’s SRM token to tank by over 75% since November 6th. The Solana Foundation held over $100 million in SRM on FTX at that time, which has now been entirely lost. 

The month before that was a catastrophe for DeFi more broadly. Ultimately ending with $657 million in losses from smart contract exploits.