Xave Finance Hack

TOTAL LOST —
Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
Same Technique 415 Total incidents
Auditors 1 Prior security audit

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Xave Finance was exploited and the hacker was able to mint over 99% of the $RNBW token's original supply. The accident dropped the token price by more than 99%.

Details of the Exploit

Xave Finance also known as HaloDAO is a platform that aims to provide DeFi operations to traditional financial institutes. $RNBW is an ERC20 token of the project, that is listed on Coinbase. The hacker deployed a smart contract to exploit the DaoModule contract and executed the proposal to take ownership of the contract.

Consequently, the attacker minted 100,000,000,000,000 $RNBW tokens to his address and swapped them for 89,000,000,000,000 $xRNBW tokens. All the stolen amounts sit at the hacker's address at the moment, and their value is unknown.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x0f44f348…1fc1e2

Malicious contract:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xe167cdaa…ee86d3

Malicious transaction:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc18ec2eb…f31f4a

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Xave Finance
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification Token
Primary Source View Post-Mortem

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Dexs
Affected Token RNBW
Official Website www.xave.co/
Protocol Twitter/X @https://mobile.twitter.com/XaveFinance
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Unverified

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 Xave Finance's contract logic - root cause: token
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 —. Prior audits don't guarantee safety, especially after post-audit code changes.

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Xave Finance, 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.

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Security Audit History

Sources & References

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