Incident Overview
On March 1, 2025, Zoth, a restaking layer for real-world assets (RWAs), was exploited for approximately $285,000.
The vulnerability stemmed from Zoth’s reliance on the initial stablecoin deposit amount rather than the actual collateral received after a swap when validating LTV ratios. By manipulating Uniswap V3 pool prices, the attacker caused the swap to return only 7,669 collateral tokens, but the protocol incorrectly recorded 330,979 tokens as received collateral. This inflated value allowed the attacker to mint excess ZeUSD far beyond their actual backing.
After minting, they burned the ZeUSD to withdraw the falsely recorded collateral, ultimately profiting $285,000. The absence of slippage checks and post-swap collateral validation made this attack possible.
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 Zoth, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (March 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Oracle Issue are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Oracle Manipulation & Price Manipulation attack class for patterns
- Audit oracle price feeds for manipulation risks - ensure time-weighted average prices (TWAPs) or multi-source aggregators are used, not spot prices
- 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 Zoth
The Zoth 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.