Wasabi Protocol Loses $4.5 Million Due to Compromised Admin Key

The decentralized finance sector continues to experience significant losses, with Wasabi Protocol being the latest victim. On Thursday, the protocol, which is a perpetuals trading platform built on Ethereum and Base, was drained of around $4.55 million after its deployer key was compromised, according to security firm Blockaid. This incident is the latest in a series of DeFi losses, which have surpassed $605 million across at least 12 incidents this month. The attack bears a striking resemblance to the Drift Protocol exploit on April 1, where North Korea-linked attackers used a compromised admin key to drain $285 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange. The attackers gained access to the deployer key, which held the sole ADMIN_ROLE in Wasabi's permission system, and then granted themselves admin privileges without delay. They then upgraded Wasabi's perp vaults and Long Pool to malicious implementations, resulting in the draining of balances. The exploit relied on the Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard (UUPS), which allows a smart contract to change its underlying code while retaining the same address. However, the lack of timelock or multisig protections meant that a single key held full control over the protocol, leaving it vulnerable to attack. The affected 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 advised 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 DeFi losses, 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. The common thread among these incidents is not a new vulnerability, but rather the exploitation of existing weaknesses, highlighting the need for improved security measures in the DeFi sector.