Solana-Based Raydium Exchange Victim of 7-Figure Exploit

Solana-based decentralized exchange platform Raydium confirmed in a tweet on Friday that it had been the victim of an exploit.

At press time, around $2 million worth of different cryptocurrencies was sitting in the account of an attacker that managed to maliciously withdraw user funds from Raydium exchange pools.

“Initial understanding is owner authority was overtaken by attacker, but authority has been halted on AMM & farm programs for now,” Raydium wrote in its tweet, referring to automated market makers.

Raydium, which allows users to trade between different cryptocurrencies without the use of an intermediary, is one of the premier platforms in Solana’s beleaguered decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. According to its own numbers, Raydium has around $45 million locked in trading pools and facilitated around $4 million in trades in the past 24 hours. It is unclear whether that $4 million includes the improper withdrawals from the attacker.

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.

CORRECTION (Dec. 16, 3:35 UTC): Fixed the headline to show the scale of the exploit was seven figures, not larger.