Wasabi Protocol Loses $4.5 Million Due to Compromised Admin Key

The DeFi 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 approximately $4.55 million after its deployer key was compromised, according to a security report by Blockaid. This incident is the latest in a series of DeFi losses that have totaled over $605 million across at least 12 incidents this month. The attack bears a striking resemblance to the Drift Protocol exploit that occurred on April 1, where North Korea-linked attackers used a compromised admin key to drain $285 million from the Solana-based perpetuals exchange. The hack was carried out through an externally owned account called wasabideployer.eth, which held the sole ADMIN_ROLE in Wasabi's permission system. The attacker gained access to the deployer key and granted themselves admin privileges with no delay by calling grantRole on the permission contract. Subsequently, a helper contract was used to upgrade Wasabi's perp vaults and Long Pool to malicious implementations that drained the balances. The exploit leveraged the Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard (UUPS), which enables a smart contract to change its underlying code while retaining the same address. UUPS is widely used as it allows developers to fix bugs without migrating users. However, if an attacker gains control of admin permissions, they can replace the contract's logic with malicious code designed to steal funds. Wasabi lacked a timelock or multisig to protect the admin role, leaving a single key with full control over the protocol. Blockaid's exploit detection system identified the ongoing admin-key compromise exploit on Wasabi Protocol across Ethereum and Base. 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 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. This month has seen a series of exploits, including the Drift Protocol breach, where attackers exploited a single-key admin setup with no governance timelock. On April 19, Kelp DAO lost $292 million when an attacker exploited a single-verifier configuration in the protocol's LayerZero bridge. The cumulative DeFi loss total for 2026 has now surpassed $770 million across more than 30 reported incidents, with April accounting for the majority of that figure. Smaller breaches this month have hit CoW Swap, Grinex, Resolv Labs, and Volo Protocol, among others. A common thread among these incidents is not a new vulnerability, but rather the repetition of similar security breaches, with each incident producing the same post-mortem language about lessons learned, only for the next exploit to occur before those lessons are implemented. Wasabi has not yet issued a public statement on the incident.