How Solana's Largest Perp DEX Was Exploited for $285 Million
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing we hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com. Introducing Nexo, the premier digital wealth platform. Receive interest on your digital assets. Borrow against them without selling. Trade a variety of cryptocurrencies. All in one platform. No
Hi, Laura. Thanks for having me.
Solana's Drift Protocol, the largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange on the Solana blockchain was hacked for $285,000,000 which just for context, the protocol's total value locked before the attack was about 500,000,000. So that was over half of the money in the protocol that was drained. That also puts this hack amongst the top 10 DeFi hacks of all time and the biggest this year thus far. The Drift token dropped from over 7¢ to 3.9¢ on the news and is now trading a bit above 5¢. So the hack was pretty multi layered and also quite methodical it seems. It sort of seemed chilling readin
Yeah, definitely. And I really agree with what you said in the opening that it is chilling. I think we've seen a lot of hacks, unfortunately, already in this year. Many of them seem like it could be someone who's potentially less experienced and gains access to some key or admin privilege and kind of takes it from there. But this one was very technical, well thought out. And from what we know today, spend at least three weeks. I can jump into of the end to end timeline or
Yeah. Yeah. Please do.
Cool. So around I think as of today, around twenty one days ago, for if I'm not mistaken, for the first time, Drift initiated a migration towards a multisig. This multisig was a two zero five multisig. Notably, it had zero time lock on any of the functions it could execute. And for listeners, what time lock means is even though certain privileges in an application need to be signed by white listed addresses, a time lock basically says after they sign it, there's a gap between when it actually executes. And this is typically an additional security precaution to make sure that what was signed an
Yeah, yeah. And we'll break down more of these steps as we go. But when I was looking at this, it really felt like the original sin here was around this, the admin key. So explain how it was set up and how it appears to have been compromised.
Yeah. So in contrast to last week, we were talking about the Resolve hack And the Resolve hack was unique in the sense that there was one key that had effectively unlimited privileges to mint as much USR as they wanted, which made it easier for the hacker in terms of how many keys needed to be attained and compromised. Here, it wasn't a single key. It was a multisig. However, it was a two zero five multisig. So this is like the minimum amount of signatures that you would need in a multisig. So it's one step above a single key. The we're still waiting for an official, I think, plus mortem. I th
And by that, you're talking about the Axios attack that So I'm not a technical person, but it's something like there's these libraries that just hundreds of millions of people access very frequently. And so you know, these exploits in a way could be sitting in a lot of different systems.
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