Raydium DEX exploit drains $1.34M from retired AMM program

Solana-based decentralized exchange Raydium reported an exploit on its legacy AMM V3 program on Wednesday, resulting in the loss of over $1.34 million in assets. The incident affected five deprecated liquidity pools, leading to the theft of Solana (SOL), USD Coin (USDC), and Raydium's native token (RAY).

According to a post by pseudonymous Raydium contributor 0xInfra on X, the exploit impacted the firm's older automated market maker program, which was phased out in 2021 and is no longer accessible through the user interface. Raydium assured that current users and its mainnet programs were unaffected, and that the losses would be covered by the firm's treasury. The vulnerability reportedly stemmed from insufficient validation logic in the deprecated program, allowing the exploiter to mint new liquidity provider tokens.

The exploit adds to a growing number of recent vulnerabilities and attacks in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. While there is no evidence that AI was used in this specific incident, analysts have noted that AI tools are increasingly being used to discover crypto vulnerabilities.