Freeway Hack

TOTAL LOST $60.0M
High #108 All-Time Rugpull

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #108 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Freeway protocol halts services due to "unprecedented volatility". The names and photos of the team members were deleted from the project's official website.

Details of the Exploit

Freeway is a staking platform promising 43% annual returns. The platform provided Supercharge simulations staking and collected various types of assets including $BTC, $ETH, $BNB, and popular stablecoins from users. The project halts withdrawals citing "unprecedented volatility".

The names and photos of the team members were deleted from the official website after an official announcement. The $FWT token price dropped by more than 75% in 24 hours. The team tweeted on 23rd October that the project decided to "diversify assets base" and the project temporarily will not buy Supercharger simulations until the project's "new strategies will be implemented".

The $FWT token's market cap dropped from 75,000,000 to nearly 15,000,000 $USD after an incident. Estimated funds lost is roughly 60,000,000 $USD.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Freeway
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Rugpull
Classification Token,Yield Aggregator
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3 View Post-Mortem #4

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull
Affected Token FWT
Official Website freeway.io/
Protocol Twitter/X @freewayfi
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Verified On-Chain

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 Freeway's contract logic - root cause: token,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 Freeway, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).

  • 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

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