Another great breakdown by our devrel.
jacob Φ
jacob Φ10.7. klo 23.31
GMX v1 Lost $42M Through AUM Manipulation Yesterday GMX v1 suffered an attack that drained $42M through AUM manipulation. This was GMX's 2nd major hack of 2025 (lost $13M in March). Disclaimer: This is not a full post-mortem, I've mainly looked into the AUM manipulation part. The Attack Vector: 1. Exploited reentrancy in `executeDecreaseOrder` function 2. During callback, opened massive short positions at artificially low prices 3. Manipulated `globalShortAveragePrices`, inflating AUM calculation 4. System thought it had huge "unrealized profits" from shorts 5. Redeemed GLP tokens at inflated prices, extracting real assets The Core Issue: GMX's AUM = Physical Tokens + Stablecoins + Unrealized Trading Profits + Fees When shorts lose money (current price > average price), the vault "profits" and AUM increases. The attacker exploited this to create artificial profits. Simple Prevention: An AUM bounds invariant enforcing `AUM_change ≤ net_token_inflow + 5%` would have caught this immediately. The attack created massive artificial value with minimal real deposits - exactly what economic sanity checks detect. A simplified version of a @phylaxsystems assertion that could have detected and prevented the hack:
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