Incident Overview
On May 26, 2025, Dexodus Finance was exploited for approximately $291,000 through a price manipulation attack targeting its leveraged perpetuals module. The vulnerability stemmed from accepting outdated Chainlink oracle data via the performUpkeep() function, allowing the attacker to profit from stale pricing within a single transaction.
The attacker submitted a valid but stale Chainlink price report to performUpkeep(), opening a long position at an artificially low price of ~$1,816. Within the same transaction, they closed the position using a fresh price of ~$2,520, extracting nearly $300,000. The exploit was made possible due to missing freshness checks and weak replay protection in the verify() function, which failed to ensure the recency of the price report. Since Chainlink Data Streams can remain valid for up to a month, the absence of real-time data validation in high-frequency trading scenarios proved critical. Dexodus Finance acknowledged the flaw, has paused the affected contracts, and committed to refunding users.
Exploit tx:
https://basescan.org/tx/0x6ffb4942…18147e
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 Dexodus, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (May 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Oracle Issue are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation attack class for patterns
- Audit oracle price feeds for manipulation risks - ensure time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) or multi-source aggregators are used, not spot prices
- 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 TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
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