Stake DAO Hack

Reported loss $91K
Arbitrum
Access Control

What happened

On May 27, 2026, a compromised deployer account that still owned Stake DAO's vsdCRV LayerZero OFT on Arbitrum repointed the token's trusted cross-chain peer to a malicious contract. That peer sent a forged message that minted unbacked vsdCRV, which the attacker swapped through the Arbitrum Curve pool. Stake DAO reports about 43.8 ETH, roughly $91,000, in realized loss; the protocol secured legitimate backing and closed the mint path the same day.

How it happened

  1. The compromised deployer key used setPeer to replace the Arbitrum vsdCRV OFT's trusted cross-chain peer with an attacker-controlled contract.
  2. Twenty-five seconds later, the malicious peer delivered a forged LayerZero message that the OFT accepted, minting about 5.45 trillion unbacked vsdCRV.
  3. The attacker swapped part of that forged supply for about 321,143 CRV and about 7.5 ETH in the Arbitrum Curve pool, then converted the CRV to ETH.
  4. The attacker bridged 43.776 ETH to Ethereum through Stargate and later deposited 43.9 ETH into Tornado Cash.
  5. Stake DAO reset the peer, moved ownership and remaining privileged roles to its governance multisig, and secured the legitimate backing within 47 minutes.

Protocol details

Classification Yield Aggregator / Key Compromise
Protocol Type Yield
Category Bridge Hack
Implementation language Solidity
Protocol links Website @StakeDAOHQ

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Price at Hack $0.1183
Market Cap at Hack $8.0M
Reported loss / token market cap 1.13%
Token Categories
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Yield Farming Yield Aggregator Polygon Ecosystem Arbitrum Ecosystem Olympus Pro Ecosystem Ethereum Ecosystem Liquid Staking Governance Tokens

Security review history

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