Radix Foundation came clean on Sept. 17: a June 2023 code cleanup in the Radix Engine planted a vault bug, an attacker cashed it out on Aug. 31, and validators had to freeze the entire chain for over 10 days just to stop it. Total take: about $1.3 million across 26 transactions in 55 minutes. And here's the kicker — the flaw could've hit any vault on the network, not just the bridged stuff that got drained.
▪️ 26 transactions in 55 minutes on Aug. 31: 458,915 USDC + 72,420 USDT ($531,335), 61.08 ETH, 6.35 WBTC, 536.16 SOL, 32.91 BNB — call it about $1.26M.
▪️ The mechanism: that 2023 refactor broke vault reference handling. A tx could name someone else's vault by internal address and hand it straight to custom contract code.
▪️ Then the engine just ran ordinary withdraw functions with zero ownership check. No keys, no signatures — user accounts, apps and LPs were all fair game.
▪️ Assets hopped Hyperlane to Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana, got flipped for ETH. Drained LP pairs then warped prices, letting another account pull millions of XRD.
▪️ Zellic audited the protocol in 2024, engine kernel included. The flaw strolled right through the review and three years of mainnet before anyone even blinked.
▪️ Validators yanked enough stake offline to break consensus and halt the chain 10+ days. Fix deployed, user transactions back on Sept. 11.
For you this wasn't a bridge hack or a leaked key — the execution layer itself stopped checking who owns what, so every vault on Radix was exposed, including tokens with zero bridge exposure. Zellic's 2024 audit missed it, which means 'audited' stays a vibe, not a guarantee. Radix is adding regression tests, tightening review of authorization changes and formalizing the emergency halt it used to kill liveness, and says AI-assisted code analysis may have helped the attacker find a three-year-old defect. Confidence in the engine is the real collateral here.
🔮 Three years, one audit, zero detection — and 10 days of downtime to patch what a 'cleanup' broke. Who audits the audits?
@grabway_chat
