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

The decentralized finance sector continues to experience significant losses, with Wasabi Protocol being the latest victim. On Thursday, the platform, which operates on Ethereum and Base, was drained of about $4.55 million after its deployer key was compromised, according to security firm Blockaid. This incident is the latest in a series of breaches this month, which have resulted in over $605 million in losses across more than 12 incidents. The attack bears a striking resemblance to the Drift Protocol exploit, which occurred on April 1, where attackers used a compromised admin key to steal $285 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange. The attacker gained control of the Wasabi protocol by accessing the wasabideployer.eth externally owned account, which held the sole admin role in the permission system. Once the attacker had access to the deployer key, they granted themselves admin privileges without delay by calling grantRole on the permission contract. The attacker then upgraded the perp vaults and Long Pool to malicious implementations, draining the balances. The exploit relied on the Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard, which allows smart contracts to change their underlying code while maintaining the same address. However, this standard also poses a risk if an attacker gains control of admin permissions, as they can replace the contract's logic with malicious code designed to steal funds. The lack of a timelock or multisig protection on the admin role made it easier for the attacker to carry out the exploit. A timelock would have forced a delay between the announcement and execution of admin actions, giving users time to react, while a multisig would have required multiple signers to approve changes. 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. Users holding Wasabi LP tokens have been urged to revoke any active approvals to the vault contracts, as the underlying assets backing those tokens have either been drained or remain at risk. This incident is part of a larger trend of exploits in the decentralized finance sector, with over $770 million lost across more than 30 reported incidents in 2026. The majority of these losses have occurred in April, with smaller breaches hitting CoW Swap, Grinex, Resolv Labs, and Volo Protocol, among others. Despite the repeated warnings and lessons learned from these incidents, the next exploit often occurs before the necessary measures are implemented. Wasabi Protocol has not yet issued a public statement on the incident.