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GMX Plummets 25% Following $42M DeFi Exploit—Here’s What Went Wrong

GMX Plummets 25% Following $42M DeFi Exploit—Here’s What Went Wrong

Author:
Beincrypto
Published:
2025-07-09 16:12:18
15
3

DeFi's latest black eye lands with a $42 million gut punch.

GMX—the perpetual swaps darling—got rekt in a flash after attackers exploited a vulnerability, sending its token into freefall. The 25% nosedive left degens scrambling and CEX listings looking shaky.

How it happened: The usual suspects. A smart contract loophole turned into a nine-figure payday for some anon with too much time and ETH. Audits? Overrated apparently.

Silver lining? At least it wasn't another 'rug pull'—just good old-fashioned code exploitation. Progress?

The aftermath: GMX devs are now performing the ritual post-hack damage control—promising reimbursements, upgrades, and the obligatory 'we take security seriously' tweetstorm. Meanwhile, traders are left holding bags heavier than a Bitcoin maximalist's ego.

How Was GMX Hacked?

The crypto community has suffered a lot of prominent hacks lately, and it doesn’t look like the trend is slowing down. Earlier this morning, security watchdogs noticed a suspicious transaction on GMX, which now seems to be a hack.

Through unknown methods, a Tornado Cash-funded wallet managed to drain around $42 million from GMX’s liquidity provider (GLP).

🚨ALERT🚨Our system has detected a suspicious transaction involving @GMX_IO.

A malicious contract, deployed by an address funded via @TornadoCash, has exploited approximately $42M worth of assets on the Arbitrum (#ARB) network — including:$ETH, $USDC, $fsGLP, $DAI, $UNI,… pic.twitter.com/x3B5OFMcyP

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Cyvers Alerts

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(@CyversAlerts) July 9, 2025

GMX, the popular decentralized exchange, quickly responded to this major hack. Specifically, it disabled several user features related to trading, minting, and redeeming tokens.

The firm also encoded an on-chain message to the hackers, claiming that it WOULD not pursue legal action if they returned 90% of the stolen funds within 48 hours. The other 10% would be a sort of bug bounty.

Additionally, GMX is investigating the exact cause of this hack, but the results are currently inconclusive. The firm claimed that the damage was isolated to the GMX V1 exchange, and that V2, markets, other liquidity pools, and the GMX token itself are working as normal.

Nonetheless, this token dropped more than 35% and has been falling since the hack took place:

GMX Price Chart. Source: CoinGecko

Unfortunately, this is GMX’s second major hack in 2025. Earlier this March, the firm lost $13 million to an attack that also caused GMX to plummet 10%. If more serious breaches like this continue, it could damage the firm’s reputation.

ZachXBT, a prominent crypto sleuth, has already pointed out another weakness in the GMX hack. He claimed that $9.6 million in stolen funds sat on the USDC blockchain for nearly two hours before the attacker used CCTP to bridge the funds to Ethereum.

He personally attempted to flag the transaction and accused Circle of negligence in failing to freeze these assets.

Other than this successful ETH bridging, the other ~$33 million remains on Arbitrum. It’s unclear if the attackers will manage to launder the remaining proceeds from the GMX hack.

|Square

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