Incident Overview
On May 16, 2025, Demex’s lending platform Nitron was exploited through an oracle manipulation attack, leading to a loss of approximately $950,559. The exploit affected only the Nitron markets, while spot and perpetual trading on Demex remained unaffected.
The attacker manipulated the price oracle for the deprecated dGLP vault, which had low TVL due to prior user withdrawals. By donating fsGLP to the vault, they artificially inflated its redemption rate. This manipulated value was then propagated across Nitron markets via the Demex oracle.
Using the falsely elevated price of dGLP as collateral, the attacker borrowed real assets and withdrew them for profit. The root causes included a misused audited contract not intended for oracle use, failure to implement a price cap safeguard, and the omission of zeroing out LTV and supply caps after the vault was deprecated.
Incident Report
Protocol Information
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 Nitron Demex, 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
- 01
- 02
Learn to Prevent the Next Nitron Demex
The Nitron Demex 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.