Solana Exchange Raydium Hit With $1.34 Million Exploit as DeFi Attacks Grow
Raydium says five deprecated liquidity pools were exploited for more than $1.34 million. The Solana DEX says current users were not affected and treasury funds will cover the loss.
Intelligence analysis by GPT-5.4 Mini
Raydium says an exploit hit five deprecated liquidity pools in its old AMM V3 program, draining more than $1.34 million in SOL, USDC and RAY. The exchange says the pools were phased out in 2021, no current users were affected, and it plans to repay the loss from treasury funds.
Raydium found out that old, unused money pools were broken into and more than $1.34 million was taken. It is like finding an old locked shed in a backyard and discovering someone still had a way to open it even though the family stopped using it years ago.
Analysis
What happened
Raydium said five deprecated liquidity pools were exploited on Wednesday, resulting in more than $1.34 million in stolen funds. The affected pools were part of an older version of its automated market maker system, which the company says was phased out in 2021.
The exploit involved assets including SOL, USDC and Raydium’s native RAY token. In the story, a Raydium contributor said the issue was tied to the legacy AMM V3 program and that current users were not exposed through the app interface after the pools were deprecated.
How Raydium responded
Decrypt says Raydium plans to repay the funds from its treasury. That framing is important: the exchange is treating the loss as something it can absorb rather than a failure that should be passed on to active users.
Broader context
The article places the exploit inside a wider rise in DeFi attacks and vulnerability hunting. It also references Decrypt’s earlier reporting that AI tools are helping uncover major bugs faster, which raises the pressure on protocols to audit both new and old code more carefully.
The immediate market impact described in the piece is limited, but the story is another reminder that deprecated contracts and legacy infrastructure can still carry real financial risk if they remain reachable or misunderstood.
Key points
- Raydium says five deprecated liquidity pools were exploited on Wednesday.
- More than $1.34 million was stolen in SOL, USDC and RAY.
- Raydium says the affected AMM V3 program was phased out in 2021.
- The exchange says current users were not affected and it plans to repay the loss from treasury funds.
Raydium says the affected pools were already deprecated, and it says current users were not exposed. If the treasury repayment goes through cleanly, the incident may be contained without lasting damage to active traders or the protocol’s day-to-day use. The response could also reassure users that the exchange can absorb the loss instead of leaving it unresolved.
The exploit shows that old smart-contract paths can remain dangerous long after a feature is supposed to be retired. That makes it harder for users to trust that inactive code is truly harmless. The article also frames the event as part of a broader rise in DeFi attacks, which suggests more protocols may face similar pressure if their security reviews miss legacy risks.
