Transit Swap Hack

TOTAL LOST $28.9M
High #177 All-Time Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered $19.1M 66.2% returned
All-Time Rank #177 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exploit/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Transit Swap exchange was hacked due to the smart contract vulnerability. The hacker stole 28,900,000 $USD from users who approved their assets to Transit Swap. 65% of the stolen funds were recovered by the joint effort of the security teams.

Details of the Exploit

Transit Swap is a multichain DEX, running on both Ethereum and Binance chains. The project was exploited by a hacker, and roughly 28,900,000 $USD worth of assets were stolen from user's addresses. The hacker deployed malicious smart contracts to exploit the swap contracts of the project on both chains. Due to the vulnerability of the swap contracts, which allows the hacker to use transferFrom() function to drain the user's approved assets and transfer them to another EOA address.

Within 24 hours after the hack, Transit Finance announced about the recovery of 65% of stolen funds in collaboration with other security teams. And consequently, Transit Finance published an article with a list of addresses involved in the hack and said that the total recovered funds are from the hacker involved in the attack with the largest amount, and the team is working on recovering the remaining stolen funds and formulating Bug Bounty rules.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x5f0b31aa…98fbef

https://etherscan.io/address/0x5f0b31aa…98fbef

Address funds transferred:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x75f2aba6…bffd46

https://etherscan.io/address/0x75f2aba6…bffd46

Malicious contracts:

https://bscscan.com/address/0x8ca8fd9c…c68a34

https://etherscan.io/address/0x17ff6c94…f204ea

Recovering transactions:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3da18432…5e6a2a

https://bscscan.com/tx/0xd941c601…9c5f83

https://bscscan.com/tx/0x53495bd2…474e02

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Transit Swap
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Exchange (DEX)
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exploit/Other
Official Website transit.finance
Protocol Twitter/X @TransitFinance
Team Anonymous
Source Code Unverified

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
DeFi Ethereum Ecosystem Launchpad Avalanche Ecosystem Polygon Ecosystem BNB Chain Ecosystem
Protocol Links
Discord Reddit

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 other 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 Transit Swap's contract logic - root cause: exchange (dex)
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? Likely — with a thorough Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Transit Swap, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2022).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Other 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.

Free Trial

Funds Recovery

66.2%

Recovered

$19.1M

Net Loss

9768199

Post-Incident Timeline

  • 2022-10-11

    240,000 $USD was fully recovered from 4th hacker with the help of BlockSec

Sources & References

Browse all hacks

These hacks used the same attack technique. Understanding the pattern helps prevent future exploits.

DeFiTuna $570K
Other
Cascade $1.3M
Other
Lumi Finance $264K
Other
Hinkal $820K
Other
AIDCToken $121K
Other
Polymarket $3.0M
Other

Learn to Prevent the Next Transit Swap

The Transit Swap 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.

Start Free Trial Browse Attack Library
Recreate exploit patterns safely Free Trial