What happened
Drop is a cross-chain liquid staking protocol built on Neutron and a member of the Lido Alliance. On 22 September 2026 (UTC) an attacker used Neutron's own chain governance to take admin control of Drop and Astroport contracts and drain them. CryptoSlate puts Drop's loss at about $4.4 million out of a combined $9.3-9.4 million.
The attacker's Proposal 9, titled "AIATO: AI Agent Takeover. Phase 1: Agent Admin Registration", was presented as an AI governance experiment. It went through Neutron's expedited three-day track and carried 11 MsgUpdateAdmin messages. Neutron's wasmd lets chain governance rewrite any contract's admin, so the multisigs the apps relied on were not the final authority. GoPlus Security estimated that the staked NTRN deciding the vote was worth about $113,000, while it controlled about $9.4 million in contract assets.
Neutron halted, and Cosmos Hub validators stopped their chain for about 25 hours to contain funds bridged there. After the restart, 1,227,121 ATOM (about $2.1 million) was moved out of the attacker's Cosmos Hub wallet without the owner's signature. Reports did not say who controls the receiving address or how much of it belonged to Drop users. Drop had announced an orderly wind-down in November 2025 but kept dATOM and dNTRN live.
How it happened
- The attacker submitted Neutron Proposal 9 on the expedited track (three-day vote, 67% threshold). Its payload was 11
MsgUpdateAdminmessages handing admin of ten Astroport and Drop contracts to the proposer. - About an hour before the vote closed, the attacker uploaded contract code
code_id 5399with a maliciouswithdraw_all { recipient }entry point. - The attacker first voted with about 100 NTRN. Eleven minutes before the tally, they bought 31.62 million NTRN for $20,199 in USDC and delegated it, and the proposal passed.
- Once the proposal executed, the attacker used
MsgMigrateContractto move the ten contracts to the malicious code within 24 minutes and calledwithdraw_allon each. - Funds were bridged out through attacker addresses on Cosmos Hub, Noble, Axelar, dYdX and Osmosis, which GoPlus says share the Neutron address's private key, and through two separately listed Ethereum addresses. About $1.96 million had left Neutron before the chain halts.
Protocol details
Security review history
- Oak Security View report
Evidence
- report GoPlus Security: Exploit breakdown: Neutron governance attack (X post, via fxtwitter mirror) x.com
- report Drop Protocol - Medium (feed description and 'Drop to wind down operations', 26 Nov 2025) medium.com
- code [NEW]: Neutron governance takeover drains ~$9.4M from Astroport and Drop github.com
- analysis DeFiLlama defillama.com
- analysis Neutron DAO passes a new proposal, and $9.3M in crypto disappears cryptoslate.com
- analysis Cosmos Hub Restarts and Moves $2.1 Million in Stolen Tokens Out of an Attacker's Wallet unchainedcrypto.com
- analysis Neutron Governance Attack Exposes $9.4M Blockchain Exploit en.cryptonomist.ch
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