KyberSwap
A decentralized exchange drained of about $48M in November 2023 via a complex exploit of its Elastic concentrated-liquidity pools. The attacker then posted an on-chain 'treaty' demanding full executive control of the Kyber company in exchange for the funds.
Also known as: KyberSwap, Kyber Network, Kyber Director
Summary
KyberSwap is a decentralized exchange. Around November 22–23, 2023, an attacker exploited a flaw in its "Elastic" concentrated-liquidity pools to drain roughly $48 million across several chains, after which the protocol urged users to withdraw funds. [1][2]
Unusual demands
About a week later the attacker — styling themselves "Kyber Director" — posted an on-chain message demanding complete executive control of Kyber Network (the company), temporary control of its governance DAO, and all corporate documents and assets, in exchange for returning the funds; they promised to double staff salaries and reimburse liquidity providers. The demands were not met. KyberSwap separately recovered several million dollars from front-running ("MEV") bots that had skimmed the exploit. [1][2]
Bracketed numbers refer to the numbered sources listed below.
Sources (2)
See also
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — Justin Sun token freezeProjectsWLFI, a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump and his family, blacklisted/froze the wallet of major investor Justin Sun in Sept 2025 — ~540–595M unlocked WLFI tokens (~$107M) plus ~2.4B locked. Sun sued, alleging an undisclosed admin 'blacklist backdoor'; WLFI denied it and threatened a countersuit. The dispute is ongoing.
Gala Games exploitTokensOn May 20, 2024 an attacker abused a privileged minter account on the GALA token contract to mint 5 billion GALA (≈$200M+ nominal) and dumped ~600M of them for ~$22M of ETH before Gala froze the address. Gala Games called it an internal access-control failure; the attacker later returned the ~$22M.
This page was last updated on Jun 15, 2026. View revision history.
