ArbiSwap Hack

TOTAL LOST $138K
Low Infinite Mint and Dump / Rugpull arbitrum

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain arbitrum Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #1418 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Dexs Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

ArbiSwap rugpulled users for 138,057 $USD worth of $ETH, after minting 1 trillion $ARBI tokens.

Details of the Exploit

ArbiSwap is a DEX on the layer-2 chain Artibtrum. ArbiSwap was launched on February 24th, 2023, and offered the project's $ARBI token owners 100% of the revenue generated by DEX. The project quickly reached up to 4,400,000 $USD in TVL.

An ArbiSwap developer reported that their own man robbed the DEX, draining 84.6 $ETH from the $ARBI/$USDC pair. In the last 24 hours after the incident, the $ARBI token price dropped by 99%. The attacker has minted nearly 1,000,000,000,000 $ARBI tokens and drained the liquidity for 138,057 $USD.

All the stolen funds were transferred through TornadoCash.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://arbiscan.io/address/0x8a60f911…33724f

Attacker's ETH address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x2a038e10…88a869

Mint transaction:

https://arbiscan.io/tx/0x0c1c5bbc…b40abd

Transfer transactions:

https://arbiscan.io/tx/0x54ca3070…3216e1

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xf1a249b3…d86df8

Incident Report

Protocol / Project ArbiSwap
Date of Incident
Affected Chain(s) arbitrum
Attack Technique Infinite Mint and Dump / Rugpull
Classification Rugpull / Exchange (DEX),Yield Aggregator
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Dexs
Affected Token ARBI
Official Website arbiswap.io
Protocol Twitter/X @Arbi_Swap
Team Anonymous
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Collectibles & NFTs Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Token DeFi Gaming Staking Yield Farming AMM DEX
Protocol Links
GitHub

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 infinite mint and dump / rugpull and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with arbitrum smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in ArbiSwap's contract logic - root cause: rugpull / exchange (dex),yield aggregator
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? Hard to catch — private key / OpSec failures are outside smart contract audit scope

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

  • Verify all logic paths related to Infinite Mint and Dump / Rugpull 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

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Sources & References

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