This Solana-Based Decentralized Exchange Was Just Exploited – Here’s What Happened

Raydium, one of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEXes) on the Solana blockchain, has been exploited to the tune of over $2 million. 

The protocol announced early Friday that an attacker had managed to overtake the organization’s “owner authority,” which offered them access to funds, and used it to drain Raydium’s liquidity pools. 

An exploit on Raydium is being investigated that affected liquidity pools. Details to follow as more is known

⁰Initial understanding is owner authority was overtaken by attacker, but authority has been halted on AMM & farm programs for now
Attacker accnthttps://t.co/ZnEgL1KSwz

— Raydium (@RaydiumProtocol) December 16, 2022

In DeFi, a liquidity pool is a collection of user funds locked in a smart contract and accumulated to enable trading on a DEX. Liquidity pools help to maintain liquidity on a network by rewarding users who contribute assets to the pool.  

According to crypto research company Nansen, the attacker wallet has received over $2.2 million worth of tokens, including $1.6 million in SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain. 

Prism, another DEX based on Solana, noted that an unauthorized user has access to the admin wallet and is draining assets from Raydium liquidity pools. The protocol asked users to withdraw their PRISM/USDC liquidity from Raydium, claiming that it has already done so. It said:

“There seems to be a wallet that is draining LP Pools from Raydium liquidity pools using admin wallet as a signer without having/burning LP tokens. We withdrew protocol provided PRISM/USDC liquidity from Raydium WITHDRAW YOUR PRISM/USDC LIQUIDITY FROM RAYDIUM.” 

Video to check if you have LP on Raydiumhttps://t.co/TGT0vW5Gnn

— Prism | V4 (@prism_ag) December 16, 2022

Raydium is one of Solana’s largest decentralized finance protocols and is considered one of the cornerstones of the Solana DeFi ecosystem. As of now, there is over $31.7 million worth of assets locked on the protocol, according to data by DeFiLlama. The DEX had over $2.2 billion in TVL at its all-time high in mid-November 2021. 

Following the hack, Raydium’s native token RAY took a hit, losing over 10% in a matter of minutes. The token is currently trading at $0.153385, down by 12% over the past 24 hours. Meanwhile, SOL has lost around 8% over the past day.

The Solana DeFi ecosystem was hit especially hard by the collapse of the FTX exchange due to its heavy ties to the Sam Bankman-Fried trading and investment empire.

Moreover, after the FTX exchange was hacked in mid-November, it was revealed that the private keys to Solana decentralized exchange and liquidity provider Serum were also housed on the exchange. Subsequently, the developers of the project announced they are working on forking Serum’s code as many projects rushed to cut ties to Serum.