On Wednesday afternoon, the decentralized exchange (DEX) GMX was the victim of a $42 million hack. What do we know about this event?
GMX loses $42 million in hack
On Wednesday afternoon, the GMX crypto perpetual trading protocol suffered a hack worth $42 million.
It was quickly identified that it was V1 of the decentralized exchange (DEX) that was targeted on the Arbitrum layer 2, and more specifically the liquidity pools (GLP) feeding the markets:
Trading on GMX V1, as well as the creation and exchange of GLPs, have been disabled on Arbitrum and Avalanche to prevent any new attack vectors and protect users from further negative impacts. […] Please note that the exploit does not affect GMX V2, its markets, liquidity pools, or the GMX token itself.
The GMX teams quickly sent an on-chain message to the hacker’s address, offering a 10% bounty in exchange for the return of the funds:
We are aware of the recent exploit of GMX V1.
We would like to offer a 10% white hat bounty for the return of the stolen funds.
At the same time, the GMX teams also alerted protocols that may have forked GMX V1 smart contracts, as these are also vulnerable to the flaw that was discovered:
Subsequently, a number of measures were taken, such as an update and restrictions to limit the risk of recurrence. Once the investigation is fully complete, a full analysis will be published. At this stage, the extent to which users have been affected and the potential compensation that may arise has not yet been determined. According to data from DefiLlama, GMX now claims a total value locked (TVL) of $405 million, down from $506 million before the hack. In addition, the GMX token has seen its price fall 19.5% over 24 hours to $11.5 and a market capitalization of $117.3 million.
