AquaDAO Hack

TOTAL LOST $48K
Low Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1728 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

AquaDAO was exploited via proposal, which allowed the attacker to mint 100,000,000,000 $AQUA tokens.

Details of the Exploit

AquaDAO is a DAO that aims to end the world water crisis. The project was built in the Cosmos SDK based layer-1 Juno chain. The DAO was exploited by the malicious actor, which took over AquaDAO and passed a proposal that minted 100,000,000,000 $AQUA tokens to the attacker. The attacker was able to take over the DAO cause he controlled 51% of the governance tokens because the AquaDAO team did not stake a needed amount of tokens to prevent such actions.

Consequently, the bad actor wiped out multiple $AQUA pools mostly on WYND DEX, Loop, and Kujira. Pools with $AQUA and the project-related token $CASA were removed from WYND DEX after some period. The total approved lost funds are 3,889 $ATOM which is worth 47,912 $USD at the moment.

Block Data Reference

Attacker addresses:

https://www.mintscan.io/juno/account/juno1matu8jgn3rmk2955j694qmj9w30nycaf49334r

Mint transaction:

https://www.mintscan.io/juno/txs/4338A591B461DCA7ADA2B138D10955EA51F47A5A32BCDDEC3D659425B9FA7898

Malicious proposal:

https://daodao.zone/dao/juno1zea8sewknejm2yqva89u7jd3kdngm3ahra3lxfnkvxju78ljyurqldl407/proposals/A2

Address holding funds:

https://www.mintscan.io/cosmos/account/cosmos1matu8jgn3rmk2955j694qmj9w30nycafrhj2jl

Incident Report

Protocol / Project AquaDAO
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Other
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3 View Post-Mortem #4

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Affected Token AQUA
Official Website aquaswap.live
Protocol Twitter/X @AquaOnJuno
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in AquaDAO's contract logic - root cause: other
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Likely — with a thorough Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to AquaDAO, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (February 2023).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

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