Raydium's $1.34M Exploit Explained: What Solana DeFi Users Need to Know

 



A deprecated smart contract from 2021 just cost Raydium's treasury $1.34 million. The exploit hit the legacy AMM V3 program, a piece of code that was phased out years ago but still held idle liquidity that nobody could withdraw through normal means.

Five pools were drained. The attacker exploited a flaw in how the old program checked LP token legitimacy, forged a mint address, and bypassed the proportion checks protecting withdrawals. Wallets holding current Raydium positions were never in danger. The protocol's live programs use entirely different verification logic.

This is the second notable security incident in Raydium's history. The first, back in December 2022, involved a private key compromise that let an attacker drain active liquidity pools of roughly 4.4 million dollars. That hit real users in real time. This latest event is different: the affected funds had been sitting frozen inside a dead program since Serum's deprecation.

Still, $1.34 million is not trivial. The attacker swept approximately 150,177 RAY, 5,603 SOL, and 893,700 USDC from five pools before the team caught on. Raydium's core contributors are now running a security audit across all active mainnet programs, even though the vulnerability cannot propagate beyond the legacy contract.

The treasury compensation announcement matters. It signals that the team intends to make affected liquidity providers whole without touching protocol revenue from active operations.

For anyone holding RAY or providing liquidity on Solana-based DEXes, the immediate risk is zero. What this incident does do is put attention back on the question of deprecated code: old contracts holding any value are attack surfaces, even when nobody is supposed to interact with them anymore.

The full breakdown of what happened, including how the LP mint flaw worked and exactly which pools were drained, is covered in detail over at CryptoNewsLive.

Read the full story at CryptoNewsLive.org.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ripple Is Building XRPL's Defense Against Quantum Computing, and the Clock Is Already Running

Image
  Ripple has released a detailed plan to protect the XRP Ledger from quantum computing threats, and the timeline it has set is not aspirational. The target is full post-quantum cryptography readiness by 2028, with active work already underway in 2026. The roadmap runs four phases. The first is an emergency contingency for a scenario where quantum computers break classical cryptography ahead of schedule. Ripple calls this Q-Day readiness. In that scenario, the XRP Ledger would enforce a hard network shift, stopping classical public-key signatures and requiring users to migrate to quantum-safe accounts. The second and third phases cover 2026. Testing begins on NIST-recommended post-quantum algorithms under real XRPL workload conditions. Performance, storage, and bandwidth costs all get measured. Then hybrid deployment begins on Devnet, running quantum-resistant signatures alongside existing ones before anything touches the live network. Project Eleven, an organization working on cr...
Read more

Hoskinson Just Said Everything Nobody Else Will Say About Crypto in 2026

Image
  Charles Hoskinson spent over an hour on the O Show with host Wendo in April 2026 and covered ground that most crypto founders avoid in public interviews. The Midnight Network mainnet went live on March 31 with nine institutional node operators including Google Cloud, MoneyGram, Worldpay, Telegram, Vodafone's Pairpoint, eToro, Bullish, Blockdaemon, and Shielded Technologies. That alone is a headline. But it was not the most important thing he said. The AI agent argument is where this interview breaks from the usual. His position is that zero-knowledge proofs are not primarily a privacy feature. They are the only mechanism by which AI agents can verify each other's behavior. When an autonomous agent is managing your funds across multiple blockchains while you sleep, it needs mathematical proof infrastructure underneath it to constrain what it can do, protect your data without exposing it, and settle value in real time without a middleman. Midnight is being built for that future...
Read more

Everclear Is Gone and the $500M Volume Story Should Worry Every DeFi User

Image
 Everclear, the cross-chain settlement protocol that processed $500M in monthly volume, announced this week that it is shutting down. The Foundation and Labs entities are winding down operations. The product UI is already offline. The chain is non-operational. This is not a rug pull. It is something arguably more instructive: a protocol that built real volume, real technology, and real partnerships, and still could not survive. The team's own explanation makes it plain. Users were highly price-sensitive. The solver-based model that Everclear was built around never developed the revenue depth it needed, even with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the system monthly. A B2B2C pivot was attempted. Major industry names signed on. But the timelines to go live were longer than the runway the team had left. Acquisition talks were explored. They did not succeed. The CLEAR token has lost more than 52% of its value in seven days. A potential buyback is being explored in the ...
Read more