A Brussels Community Just Lost Everything to a Crypto Wallet Mistake You Can Fix Today

 



A cooperative in Brussels lost €110,000 on May 25, 2026. Not to a complex smart contract exploit. Not to a protocol vulnerability. To two signing keys stored in the same MetaMask wallet, belonging to a person who had already left the organization months earlier.

CommonHub Brussels, a social community hub, ran its treasury through a SAFE multisig wallet on Gnosis Chain. SAFE wallets are considered one of the safest tools in Web3 finance — they require multiple independent signatories to approve any transaction. The system works, as long as the keys are genuinely independent and the signatories are still part of the team.

Neither condition held here.

Xavier Damman, speaking for the organization on X, confirmed that both keys belonged to the same individual, stored on one device. When an attacker compromised that MetaMask, both signatures were available instantly. The threshold was met. The €110,000 cleared in one transaction.

The funds were converted from EURe, a regulated euro stablecoin issued by Monerium, into xDAI on Gnosis Chain. Visible on-chain, but according to Damman, effectively unrecoverable. xDAI can be remixed quickly enough that address blocking offers no real protection.

This is not a story about a technical failure in SAFE or Gnosis Chain. It is a story about what happens when key hygiene and offboarding procedures are treated as optional. In traditional finance, removing a former employee's access to accounts is a standard HR step. In Web3 treasury management, it requires an active on-chain transaction. It rarely happens automatically. It rarely gets scheduled. And when it is skipped, the exposure sits there quietly until someone finds it.

Any small organization, community group, DAO or NGO managing shared funds through a crypto wallet should treat this as a direct warning. Check your signatories today. Confirm every key belongs to a current, active member. Confirm each key is stored on a separate, secure device.

The full breakdown of what happened to CommonHub Brussels, including on-chain transaction data and the full thread from Xavier Damman, is reported at CryptoNewsLive.org.

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