Vires Finance Hack

TOTAL LOST $500M
Critical #25 All-Time Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #25 By amount stolen
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Vires Finance has experienced a liquidity crunch due to overextended loans, resulting in a bad debt of over 500,000,000 $USD

Details of the Exploit

Vires Finance is a decentralized money market protocol built on top of the Waves blockchain, which provides lending and borrowing opportunities. $USDN is an algorithmic stablecoin of the project, that had over 1,260,000,000 $USD in TVL at that moment.

On 3rd April 2022, the platform experienced a liquidity crunch, which prompted Waves founder Sasha Ivanov to step in and take on the bad debt of about 500,000,000 $USD. Ivanov has since pledged to slowly liquidate the debt without causing the coin to depeg. To manage the debt, Vires has limited withdrawals to $1,000 $USD per user per day. The company sporadically adds liquidity to Vires, which is quickly withdrawn. $USDN has managed to restore its $1 peg for a brief period and then lost a peg multiple times. In the end, the token lost its peg permanently and was rebranded, and now it is not stablecoin anymore. The new token was named Neutrino Index and has a $XTN symbol, and it has only 112,000,000 $USD as a TVL

Block Data Reference

XTN address:

https://new.wavesexplorer.com/assets/DG2xFkPdDwKUoBkzGAhQtLpSGzfXLiCYPEzeKH2Ad24p

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Vires Finance
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Stablecoin,Borrowing and Lending
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Lending
Affected Token XTN
Official Website vires.finance/
Protocol Twitter/X @viresfinance?lang=en
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Verified On-Chain

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
BNB Chain Ecosystem
Protocol Links
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 Vires Finance's contract logic - root cause: stablecoin,borrowing and lending
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
Audited by Audit Report 1 — still lost $500M. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Vires Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (April 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

Security Audit History

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 Vires Finance

The Vires Finance 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