Incident Overview
Trade.io experienced a security breach resulting in the loss of over 50 million Trade tokens (TIO) from its cold storage wallets.
An unknown party managed to withdraw 50 million TIO tokens from Trade.io's cold storage wallets. These tokens were meant to be allocated for the Liquidity Pool. The stolen funds were the company's backup cryptocurrency, held in reserve for peak trading activity.
An estimated 1.3 million of the stolen tokens were transferred to both Bancor and Kucoin.
The Etherscan records of the stolen funds:
https://etherscan.io/token/0x80bc5512…0fa1df
The transactions to Bancor and Kucoin:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5a504fe7…c37991
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x5a504fe7…c37992
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 Trade.io, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2018).
- Verify all logic paths related to Access Control are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Access Control Attacks attack class for patterns
- 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
Learn to Prevent the Next Trade.io
The Trade.io 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.