DeFi hackers ring in New Year with 3 attacks in 5 days

Budding DeFi protocols have already struggled to keep hackers at bay in 2024, with almost $100 million lost in less than a week

article-image

Pavel Ignatov/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

The first week of 2024 already has DeFi users on edge after three security incidents in five days.

Over the new year, South Korean cross-chain bridging project Orbit Chain lost $80 million in assets to hackers who’d raided the protocol’s multi-signature wallet.

The team says it’s now working with domestic and international law enforcement to determine the next steps and ways to execute a viable recovery plan.

On Monday — two days after the Orbit attack — cross-chain money market Radiant Capital lost an estimated $4.5 million in a flash loan attack. 

A bad actor had manipulated the liquidity index of a freshly created native USDC market on Arbitrum to rapidly siphon crypto from the protocol, leading to pauses in lending and borrowing activities through Radiant.

Loading Tweet..

The attack left Radiant Capital with bad debt and the team says it has since taken steps to re-capitalize. The hope is that users could regain access to their deposits. 

Next up was liquidity management platform Gamma Strategies, where an estimated $3.4 million was lost on Thursday. The attacker manipulated Gamma’s accounting mechanisms to mint an excess of liquidity provider tokens, which allowed them to illegitimately withdraw more than 1,300 ETH. 

Gamma has since shut off deposits on public-facing vaults to prevent further attacks. 

Loading Tweet..

Continued exploits across DeFi have left some concerned about the future of the space. 

“DeFi really needs to wake up,” Paul Frambot, CEO of software research and development company Morpho Labs posted on X. “It has been seven years, yet every week, new large-scale hacks, incidents freezing platforms, economic attacks.”

“We are missing orders of magnitude. We need to change the current paradigm.”

This sentiment is shared by Phillip Shoemaker, executive director of Identity.com, a non-profit organization providing decentralized identity verification. 

“Security audits are critical for this industry, including for smart contracts and data storage. But I don’t think there’s nearly enough security audits happening in the digital asset space as a whole,” Shoemaker told Blockworks.

He noted that the blockchain space needs to be doing “much, much more in this regard.”

“I think these hacks and various breaches are pushing a lot of people away from engaging with the industry – people just don’t know what’s secure and what’s not. This is something that we as an industry really need to address more thoroughly,” Shoemaker said.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

morpho 2 graphic.png

Research

Utilizing a ‘DeFi Mullet’ approach, Coinbase’s Bitcoin-backed loans integration with Morpho demonstrates a powerful blueprint for CEXs to monetize dormant assets by expanding adoption of wrapped products (cbBTC, USDC) while also supporting native and/or preferred DeFi ecosystems (Base) which can further lead to downstream growth in onchain liquidity and increased utilization of the related assets.

article-image

The firm behind Helium announced that it reached a settlement with the SEC

article-image

SKALE’s Jack O’Holleran said that certain metrics are becoming more important to gauging the success of a project

article-image

Mary Gooneratne, co-founder of Solana DeFi startup Loopscale, wants to give blockchain borrow-lend a facelift

article-image

BlackRock, Fidelity and others had their spot ETH EFTs approved, and we may see more crypto products come to market

article-image

Inflation reached a five-month low in March, but 10% blanket levy may impact prices

article-image

The administration announced a pause on reciprocal tariffs, but the bond market shows signs of trouble