Wasabi Protocol Loses $4.5 Million to Hackers Due to Admin Key Breach

The DeFi sector continues to grapple with significant financial losses, and Wasabi Protocol has become the latest victim, suffering a loss of around $4.55 million on Thursday after its deployer key was compromised by hackers, according to a report by security firm Blockaid. This incident marks the latest in a string of attacks that have plagued the DeFi space over the past month, resulting in cumulative losses exceeding $605 million across at least 12 separate incidents. The attack on Wasabi Protocol bears a striking resemblance to the breach of Drift Protocol on April 1, in which North Korea-linked hackers utilized a compromised admin key to drain $285 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange. The attack was carried out through an externally owned account (EOA) known as wasabideployer.eth, which held the exclusive ADMIN_ROLE within Wasabi's permission system. An EOA is a type of wallet that is controlled by a private key, as opposed to a smart contract, and the individual in possession of the key has full control over the wallet. Once the attackers gained access to the deployer key, they were able to grant themselves admin privileges without any delay by invoking the grantRole function on the permission contract. The attackers then utilized a helper contract to upgrade Wasabi's perp vaults and Long Pool to malicious implementations, resulting in the drainage of the balances, as reported by Blockaid. The exploit leveraged the Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard (UUPS), which enables a smart contract to modify its underlying code while retaining the same address. UUPS is widely adopted due to its ability to allow developers to rectify bugs without requiring users to migrate. However, the downside of this standard is that if an attacker gains control of admin permissions, they can replace the contract's logic with any code they desire, including malicious code designed to steal funds. According to Blockaid, Wasabi lacked a timelock or multisig to protect the admin role. A timelock imposes a delay between the announcement and execution of an admin action, providing users with a window to react. A multisig, on the other hand, requires multiple signers to approve a change. The absence of these security measures left a single key in control of the protocol, rendering it vulnerable to attack. Blockaid's exploit detection system identified an ongoing admin-key compromise exploit on the Wasabi Protocol across both Ethereum and Base. The Wasabi: Deployer EOA was used to grant the ADMIN_ROLE to an attacker-controlled helper contract, which then utilized UUPS to upgrade the perp vaults and LongPool to malicious implementations. The compromised contracts include Wasabi's wWETH, sUSDC, wBITCOIN, wPEPE, and Long Pool vaults on Ethereum, as well as its sUSDC, wWETH, sBTC, sVIRTUAL, sAERO, and sBRETT vaults on Base, according to Blockaid. Users holding Wasabi LP tokens were advised to revoke any active approvals to the vault contracts, as the underlying assets backing those tokens had either been drained or remained at risk. A series of exploits has plagued the DeFi space over the past month, with the Drift Protocol breach being a notable example. In that incident, attackers exploited a single-key admin setup with no governance timelock, listing a fake token as collateral and raising withdrawal limits to drain real assets in approximately 12 minutes. Three weeks later, on April 19, Kelp DAO suffered a loss of $292 million when an attacker exploited a single-verifier configuration in the protocol's LayerZero bridge, releasing 116,500 unbacked rsETH that was then used as collateral to borrow real ether (ETH) from Aave. The total DeFi losses for 2026 have now exceeded $770 million across more than 30 reported incidents, with April alone accounting for the majority of this figure. Other notable breaches this month include CoW Swap ($1.2 million), Grinex ($13.74 million), Resolv Labs ($23 million), and Volo Protocol ($3.5 million), among others. A common thread among these incidents is not a new vulnerability, but rather the same post-mortem analysis and language about lessons learned, only to be followed by another exploit before the lessons can be implemented. Wasabi has yet to issue a public statement regarding the incident. UPDATE (April 30, 11:34 UTC): General edits have been made throughout, and the Drift Protocol exploit has been moved to the third paragraph.