Incident Overview
On August 4th, 2025, CrediX, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Sonic, was exploited for approximately $4.5 million, about a month after its launch. The attacker exploited poor access controls to drain funds from the protocol, but CrediX successfully negotiated with the exploiter to recover all stolen assets through a private settlement paid from the CrediX treasury.
The attack began six days before the actual exploit when an account controlled by the attacker was assigned broad administrative permissions including ASSET_LISTING_ADMIN, BRIDGE, EMERGENCY_ADMIN, POOL_ADMIN, and RISK_ADMIN via ACLManager by the Credix Multisig wallet. The critical BRIDGE role enabled the core attack vector. Using these elevated privileges, the attacker minted unbacked acUSDC tokens within the protocol's Sonic USDC market and drained deposited assets from the protocol's pools.
The stolen $4.5 million was then bridged from Sonic to Ethereum and distributed across three different wallets. The attack was funded initially through Tornado Cash, which also helped launder part of the proceeds. The root cause was a vulnerability in the protocol's privilege management system that allowed excessive permissions to be assigned to the malicious account, highlighting the importance of proper access control and separation of privileges in DeFi protocols.
Attacker Wallets on Ethereum:
Incident Report
Protocol Information
Market Context at Time of Hack
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.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to CrediX, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Private Key Compromised / Access Control are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control Attacks attack class for patterns
- 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.
Free TrialSecurity Audit History
- Audit Report 1 Report
Related Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next CrediX
The CrediX hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.