On January 26, Beijing time, the crypto security agency BlockSec Phalcon detected contract attacks on SwapNet and Aperture Finance in a multi-chain environment, with total losses roughly estimated at over 17 million USD, of which SwapNet lost about 13.41 million USD and Aperture lost about 3.67 million USD. This is not a traditional contract reentrancy or price manipulation, but rather an incident occurring between arbitrary call permissions of non-open-source contracts and the token authorization (transferFrom) that users had already granted: the attacker simply took over this "key" and drained assets across multiple chains. The event once again places security design and user asset protection in opposition, and raises a more controversial new suspense: after approximately 3 million USDC was traced to an address with freezing conditions, Circle has yet to freeze it, and how this centralized authority is exercised is evolving into the focus of a new round of games.
Non-open-source Contracts Become Black Box Cutting Through the Fund Pool
● Black box deployment: In multi-chain deployments, project teams often choose to keep key contracts non-open-source to "maintain competitive advantage" or accelerate iteration, exposing only interfaces without disclosing source code. On the surface, this practice is not uncommon, but in environments where multiple chains such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and BSC are deployed simultaneously, the lack of public source code means that third-party audits and community reviews cannot fully cover the attack surface, and any design error in permissions could be replicated across multiple chains as systemic risk.
● Arbitrary calls + authorization abuse: From the currently available information, the key to this attack lies in the contract being granted "arbitrary call" capability, allowing it to call other contract functions on behalf of users; meanwhile, users had previously granted sufficient token authorization to these contracts during normal interactions. The attacker did not need to breach complex defenses; they only needed to exploit this arbitrary call capability to invoke the transferFrom of the authorized tokens, allowing them to withdraw assets from the fund pool one by one without triggering additional user confirmations. This "sliding down normal permissions" path also made the attack harder to monitor and identify in its early stages.
● Loss breakdown and asset overview: According to a single source's statistics, the overall loss from the incident exceeds 17 million USD, with SwapNet approximately 13.41 million USD and Aperture Finance approximately 3.67 million USD. These losses span the Ethereum mainnet and multiple chains such as Arbitrum, Base, and BSC, involving various mainstream assets and token types. Although a detailed breakdown by chain and token has not yet been publicly released, the cross-chain deployment of the same set of permissions and logic across multiple chains means that the attack effect presents "horizontal diffusion," turning a single permission error into collective passivity across multiple networks.
● Multi-chain permissions and upgrade risks: Under multi-chain deployment, project teams often layer upgradeable contracts, proxy contracts, and cross-chain bridge logic, complicating the permission hierarchy. Once a control contract possesses a wide range of administrative permissions or arbitrary call capabilities, and lacks clear separation and multi-signature constraints, these designs can amplify into systemic security risks after being replicated across multiple chains: any logical flaw on one chain can be "synchronized and amplified" through shared code and a unified permission model, turning what should be a locally controllable incident into a cross-chain disaster.
Project Team's Emergency Brake: Frontend Shutdown…
● Immediate impact of frontend shutdown: After the attack was disclosed, Aperture Finance chose to disable the core functions of its frontend, attempting to prevent ordinary users from continuing to interact with risky contracts. This "emergency brake" is timely from a security perspective, but from an experience perspective, it abruptly "cuts off power": for users lacking on-chain operational experience, the frontend service stoppage not only means they cannot conduct transactions and manage strategies normally, but they also lose immediate insight into their asset status, amplifying panic.
● Technical threshold for revoking authorization: The project team also urged users to quickly revoke their authorizations for the relevant contracts. Technically, this means users need to manually select the approved contracts and execute the revoke operation through blockchain explorers, authorization management tools, or third-party security panels. For users familiar with on-chain operations, this is a routine self-rescue action; however, for many users relying on frontend interfaces, understanding the difference between "authorization" and "transfer," finding the correct contract address, and paying gas fees to complete the revocation all pose significant barriers, exposing the long-term gap in user self-rescue capabilities and security education in crisis situations.
● Response speed and transparency boundaries: From currently available public channels, it can be observed that the project team's response to the frontend after the incident was relatively swift, and they proactively released risk alerts and authorization revocation guidelines. However, at the technical detail level, there has yet to be a thorough disclosure regarding which specific logic or permission configuration was abused, and whether there were any misused upgradeable proxies, among other key issues. Considering that the complete technical details of the attack path have not been made public, the outside world cannot currently assess the true level of internal auditing and permission governance within the project, with transparency initially stopping at "informing that something has happened," and still having a significant distance from "informing how it happened."
● Backward pressure effect: Open source and audits will become necessities: The frequent occurrence of such multi-chain attack events is creating reverse pressure on the industry. Non-open-source contracts may maintain a "product black box" in the short term, but when security incidents occur, the lack of public source code severely weakens the rapid response capabilities of third-party security teams and the community. It can be anticipated that for multi-chain aggregators, cross-chain protocols, and strategy platforms, contract open-sourcing, introducing third-party security audits, and establishing clear permission governance and change processes will no longer just be image projects, but will become fundamental thresholds for investment institutions and users to evaluate projects.
ZachXBT's Outrage Against Circle…
● 3 million USDC freezing controversy: Notable on-chain tracker ZachXBT pointed out after the incident that approximately 3 million USDC had flowed into addresses that technically have freezing conditions, but the issuer Circle has not frozen or disposed of the relevant assets. In previous attack incidents, the freezing function of USDC has been activated multiple times, so this time's "inaction" immediately sparked controversy: when the source and flow of funds are clearly identified as proceeds of an attack, whether the centralized issuer should intervene more actively has become a new line of public debate.
● Historical context of the freezing mechanism: The reason USDC can be frozen is due to the blacklist and freezing functions built into its contract, allowing the issuer to lock or zero out the balances of specific addresses. In previous hacker attacks, compliance sanctions, and law enforcement cooperation scenarios, Circle has repeatedly utilized this capability to freeze USDC of named addresses, providing a path for victims to recover some assets. This has led the market to gradually form the expectation that when the attack is sufficiently clear, USDC freezing will be an anticipated option.
● Balancing compliance and protection: In this incident, the outside world does not yet grasp Circle's internal decision-making processes and specific considerations. However, from a compliance perspective, on one hand, activating the freezing function too frequently or based on opaque standards may trigger a chain of regulatory, privacy, and legal issues; on the other hand, for funds clearly related to the attack, failing to intervene could lead to public accusations of insufficient protection of user property. It can be imagined that Circle needs to balance multiple factors such as judicial assistance, evidence sufficiency, and cross-jurisdictional compliance requirements, but the specific weight distribution remains a black box to the outside.
● Boundaries of centralized freezing authority: The freezing capability of USDC essentially places a form of "final adjudication power" beyond the protocol layer in the hands of a single institution. For the decentralized narrative, this undoubtedly creates tension: on one hand, users enjoy the liquidity and compliance convenience brought by USDC; on the other hand, they must also accept the reality that assets can be unilaterally frozen in extreme situations. When large-scale attacks like this one occur, and people expect this power to be used to recover assets, the entire industry is being forced to redefine a question: when to activate, how to activate, and for whom to activate this freezing sword, so as not to completely deviate from the open and neutral ideals claimed by the crypto world.
From Ethereum to BSC: Multi-chain Links…
● Multi-chain diffusion of attack paths: This incident spans Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Base, and BSC, with the attacker utilizing the same logic to replicate the attack path across multiple networks. The original intention of multi-chain deployment is to improve capital efficiency and user coverage, but when key contracts have permission design flaws, security issues on one chain can be "moved" to all deployed chains at no cost, expanding the attack surface from a single point to a plane, and multiplying the risks.
● Cross-chain bridges and systemic risks: Cross-chain bridges and multi-chain asset management contracts bear the responsibility of value mapping and transfer of assets between different chains, thus typically holding large amounts of funds and key permissions. Permission errors, improper whitelist configurations, or logical vulnerabilities, if they occur at these infrastructure levels, are no longer just localized losses of a single DApp, but rather systemic risks that could implicate the entire multi-chain ecosystem. In this incident, although the specific underlying attack details of the bridging components have not been disclosed, the results clearly show that the multi-chain architecture provided greater profit space and a more complex tracking environment for the attack.
● Cascading effects of a single design flaw: This attack reveals the process of a single contract design flaw being amplified layer by layer through shared code and authorization mechanisms across multiple chains. As long as a core contract maintains the same logic and permission structure across multiple chains, any authorization granted by users on any chain will logically become an "entry point" for exploitation. This means that merely patching a flaw on one chain cannot prevent the risks posed by the continued use of old logic on other chains, turning a single design error into cascading losses across networks.
● Unified security perspective in the multi-chain era: In a multi-chain environment, merely making localized patches to single-chain contracts is far from sufficient. Teams need to design a unified permission model, clear role separation, and a cross-chain monitoring system at the architectural level to ensure that any high-permission operations can be audited and alerted in real-time. Otherwise, each new chain added and each deployment of the same logic will add new uncertainties on top of existing risks. Future security strategies must upgrade from "fixing a bug on a certain chain" to "managing the risk landscape of the entire multi-chain system."
Market Correction and Whale Movements: Panic…
● Background of external pressure: On the same day this multi-chain attack occurred, traditional markets were also under pressure—the Nikkei 225 index fell by 1.79%, indicating a general pullback in global risk asset sentiment. For the already highly sensitive crypto market, negative feedback at the macro level amplifies the response intensity to any security event, making technical incidents more easily interpreted as "systemic risks," thereby triggering more severe capital fluctuations.
● Whale withdrawal hedging signal: On-chain data shows that on that day, a certain address withdrew 1500 BTC from Binance, approximately 131 million USD. Against the backdrop of rising panic, such large withdrawals are often seen as a signal of long-term holding or self-custody, contrasting with short-term sell-offs. It reminds the market that amidst local security incidents and macro pullbacks, some funds choose to leave exchanges and extend their holding periods rather than simply join the selling queue.
● Misalignment of short and long cycles: Meanwhile, the Ethereum validator queue is backlogged with approximately 3.12 million ETH, valued at about 9.01 billion USD at market price. These funds waiting for staking or exit processing represent a continued bet on Ethereum's long-term security and yield model. In the short term, multi-chain attacks, macro pullbacks, and emotional fluctuations may trigger price flash crashes, but from the perspective of validator data, long-term locked positions and network security investments have not seen synchronized withdrawals, indicating a clear cyclical misalignment in market structure: short-term emotions are highly volatile, while long-term beliefs remain relatively stable.
● Tug-of-war between panic and positioning: Observing the multi-chain attack alongside the macro pullback of the day reveals that funds are not simply fleeing in one direction, but are repeatedly engaging in a tug-of-war between panic and opportunistic positioning. Some risk-averse funds may choose to reduce their positions for safety, while other institutions and high-net-worth individuals might increase long positions by taking advantage of the price pullback and the "discount expectations" created by security events. This differentiation means that each security incident is not only a test of technology and contracts but also a magnifying glass for market sentiment and funding styles.
Hacker Script Difficult to Stop: Asset Security Progress…
The recent multi-chain attack on SwapNet and Aperture Finance once again condenses the core lessons of current crypto infrastructure: abuse of permissions in non-open-source contracts, the replication risk of shared logic in multi-chain deployments, and the loss of control over user authorization management, all pushed to the forefront in a high-leverage funding environment. The hacker did not employ extremely sophisticated attack methods but instead exploited the "convenience" that already existed and was underestimated within the system—arbitrary calls and loose authorizations, turning black box contracts into sharp blades that cut through the fund pool.
In the foreseeable next cycle, users' management habits regarding authorizations and project teams' self-discipline and transparency in permission design will become the most realistic and often overlooked risk defenses. Users need to learn to regularly review and revoke unnecessary authorizations, while project teams must provide more mature answers regarding reasonable decentralization, open-source audits, and observable permissions; otherwise, any successful attack will quickly erode trust premiums.
At the same time, assets like USDC that have freezing capabilities will inevitably be required to bear more responsibility and disclosure obligations in future attack events: when to intervene, to what extent to intervene, and how to communicate with the judiciary and the community will all determine its social role as a "centralized anchor point." Excessive passivity may be criticized for "allowing assets to be looted," while excessive proactivity may be condemned for "deviating from the spirit of decentralization." This tension will not disappear quickly.
The interplay of contract security, multi-chain architecture, and regulatory compliance will continue to shape the underlying order of the next round of crypto infrastructure for a long time. The technical capabilities of security teams, the governance designs of project teams, and the regulatory boundaries of institutions cannot provide answers in isolation; they can only be forced to converge towards a more mature yet complex balance point through repeated similar events.
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