How much was lost in the Celestia hack?

The Celestia hack resulted in $161K in losses on October 20, 2023.

What attack technique was used in the Celestia exploit?

The Celestia exploit utilized Rugpull. Understanding this attack vector is critical for smart contract auditors and developers building secure DeFi protocols.

How can developers prevent similar smart contract attacks?

Preventing smart contract hacks requires a combination of secure coding practices, thorough security audits, and understanding common attack vectors like reentrancy, oracle manipulation, and access control flaws. Smart Contract Hacking (SCH) provides hands-on training to help developers and auditors identify and prevent vulnerabilities before deployment.

Celestia Hack

TOTAL LOST $161K

Low Oct 20, 2023 Rugpull

Affected Chain 2023 Incident surface

Recovered - No recovery reported

All-Time Rank #1374 By amount stolen

Protocol Type Canonical Bridge Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Fake Celestia (TIA) project exit scammed through a rugpull, draining 160,731 USD worth of liquidity from PancakeSwap, affecting 763.77 WBNB.

Details of the Exploit

TIA, a BEP20 token trading on PancakeSwap, experienced an exit scam on Oct 20, 2023. The deployer renounced ownership after creating the token and then minted a significantly larger number of tokens. The scammer sold 1,000,000,000,000,000 TIA tokens, completely depleting the liquidity pool.

The stolen funds were transferred to another EOA and then distributed between multiple addresses. It is assumed that the deployer created the contract in this way precisely so that it could later be hacked.

Block Data Reference

Deployer Address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xf2C89D0C…03548b

Scammer Addresses:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xc8B96725…3A4FfC

https://bscscan.com/address/0xFcCe0c3B…8FD2d4

https://bscscan.com/address/0x17F06EC1…a47831

Draining Transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x00726ed1…5b40f1

Funding Transaction:

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x664529d2…e1c963

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Celestia

Date of Incident October 20, 2023

Attack Technique Rugpull

Classification Token

Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Canonical Bridge

Affected Token TIA

Official Website celestia.org

Protocol Twitter/X @CelestiaOrg

Team Anonymous

Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories

Platform Cosmos Ecosystem Layer 1 Modular Blockchain eGirl Capital Portfolio Data Availability CMC Crypto Awards 2024 Binance Ecosystem

Protocol Links

GitHub Discord

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 rugpull 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 Celestia's contract logic - root cause: token

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 Celestia, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2023).

Verify all logic paths related to 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

01
Source 1 https://twitter.com/PeckShieldAlert/status/1715214759203615087

Threat Assessment

Severity Level

LOW

Attack Vector Rugpull
Root Cause Token
Year 2023

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