Speculators Return, So Do Familiar Exploits

Roughly a year after the collapse of FTX and the accompanying unraveling of Sam Bankman-Fried, commentators were quick to forecast or flatly announce that the crypto industry had run its course, having crashed so visibly after a brief flirtation with mainstream legitimacy.

While the sector's former figureheads now face the fallout of their own overreach — trading unsecured credit lines for prison commissary fish — early signs of a market recovery have lured dormant speculators back into a fresh bout of FOMO.

Yet the same hazards that have always stalked the space remain firmly in place. A continuous run of exploits, blatant Ponzi-style layering, chains straining under load, and an increasingly aggressive phishing environment all await anyone re-entering without caution. Teams have made real progress through the bear market, but every advance seems to open a fresh avenue for loss. Has anything actually changed?

A cluster of recent security incidents offered fresh reminders of what Rekt has termed the toll paid by careless users.

A vulnerability in Thirdweb's contract toolkit

Smart-contract toolkit Thirdweb disclosed a flaw arising from combining the ERC-2771 standard with multicall functionality, which permitted "address spoofing via malicious calldata in forwarded requests." The underlying bug itself wasn't detailed, but Thirdweb published a list of the 27 affected out-of-the-box contract templates — inadvertently handing attackers a ready-made target list.

ScamSniffer counted more than 500 mainnet token contracts and over 1,000 on BSC built on the vulnerable Thirdweb code. In the days that followed, scattered reports surfaced of projects being hit one after another — a pattern that has continued in the weeks since.

OpenZeppelin published its own post-mortem, clarifying that "the issue is not particular to the implementations contained in the OpenZeppelin Contracts library," but instead emerges from how the two standards interact when combined. The write-up laid out a sample attack path along with remediation steps for affected contracts.

Ledger's connect-kit drainer

Next came an episode that briefly threatened the standing of what had long been considered the gold standard of self-custody. Reports of odd behavior across numerous front-ends set off rumor and alarm. Within an hour, researchers had traced the cause to a wallet-draining script — later identified as the "Angel Drainer" toolkit — that had been slipped into Ledger's connect-kit source, a library many projects rely on to power wallet connections through the connect-kit loader.

The compromised npm package (since fixed) had been modified to bundle the drainer payload, which was then served to anyone connecting a wallet through any of the 290 known deployments of the affected code across the industry.

The malicious releases were pulled and a fix shipped roughly two hours after the earliest reports emerged — about four hours after the drainer code had actually gone live, with subtler warning signs visible a full hour before that. Despite reaching what may be the ecosystem's broadest and most deeply embedded phishing vector to date, the haul came to only about $600,000.

Ledger has since pledged to make victims whole and to phase out Blind Signing within six months, though whether that timeline holds remains an open question. The bigger cost may be to Ledger's already-strained credibility: a company whose entire value proposition rests on security allowed a former employee's compromised credentials to push drainer code to end users industry-wide almost instantly. Ledger's internal lapse notwithstanding, front-end teams leaning on convenient web2-style tooling might reconsider that trade-off when security is supposed to come first. Whatever share of blame individual integrators bear, the question remains whether Ledger, after so many incidents, can still rebuild user confidence.

The NFT Trader "Ape-ocalypse"

Over the following weekend came what's been dubbed the Ape-ocalypse. Users were urged to revoke approvals to NFT Trader's contract (0x13d8faF4A690f5AE52E2D2C52938d1167057B9af) after 37 BAYC and 13 MAYC tokens were drained to that address.

In total, at least $4 million in assets were lost to a reentrancy exploit that abused lingering approvals through a specially crafted self-swap. The episode turned strange when the attacker — who claimed to be acting in good faith, even while selling off victims' staked APE rewards — offered to sell the stolen NFTs back to their owners. The ransom note demanded 30 ETH per BAYC and 6 ETH per MAYC, plus an additional 10% fee "for my work," promising to return the tokens once paid and the exploit contract revoked, and closing with "I wish you all a happy day."

Fortunately, someone spotted a way to block copycats from draining the remaining NFTs, and a white-hat recovery operation returned some of the stolen assets straight to victims' wallets. Anyone who revoked approvals in time hopefully also cleared their browser cache afterward.

Shortly after the NFTs were recovered, a separate incident hit Flooring Protocol, exploited through a flaw that had been introduced during a recent upgrade.

Although the dollar losses across these three incidents were comparatively small, together they highlighted how fragile and interconnected DeFi remains. As FOMO returns, they serve as a timely reminder to stay alert and avoid leaving standing approvals on high-value assets — part of the price of self-custody.

Centralized systems, similar problems

On-chain risk and relentless phishing campaigns exploiting web2's weaknesses aren't the only threats — centralized systems offer no guaranteed safety either. Setting aside recent centralized-exchange hacks elsewhere entirely, CeDeFi has continued pulling maneuvers that would draw far more scrutiny if attempted on-chain.

BSC remains a favored playground for opportunistic actors, and a closed-source hard fork demonstrates the chain doesn't operate under the same rules as others. Clawing back funds from the BNB Bridge hacker may not feel morally troubling, but it sets an uncomfortable precedent.

Separately, OKX — whose DEX aggregator lost $2.7 million just the week before — was flagged for a critical bug in its wallet that enabled remote code execution. Rather than quietly prioritizing user safety, auditor Certik chose to publicize its findings, drawing extra attention from potential attackers in the process.

A new bull run takes shape

Risk aside, opportunity is clearly back. Solana season is reviving bull-market levels of speculative activity, apparently having shaken off its earlier association with SBF and FTX.

The Jito airdrop set off the frenzy: users with as few as 100 loyalty points (achievable by staking 1 SOL for 100 days) received close to 5,000 JTO tokens — worth nearly $10,000 at the time, and over $20,000 two days later.

Elsewhere, activity ranges from earning 4.5% yield plus loyalty "points" for entrusting upwards of $800 million to a Paradigm-backed multisig, to restaking schemes and Ponzi-style layering, to a wave of chain-clogging inscriptions. After 18 punishing months, plenty of venues exist to redeploy remaining capital, and some will likely pay off. But as retail dives back in, anyone with even a small following is tempted to rug it, hoping to recoup their own bear-market losses.

Regulators keep circling

The regulatory battle grinds on, though with ETF anticipation building, it increasingly resembles grasping at straws rather than an all-out war. Concerns over terrorism financing, meanwhile, have injected fresh energy into enforcement efforts. Tether's reversal of its earlier stance against pre-emptively freezing USDT tied to OFAC-sanctioned addresses, alongside its cooperation with the FBI, signals that US authorities will enter this cycle with considerably more leverage than before.

That may help crypto's image on illicit-finance concerns, but broader surveillance efforts are advancing too: Binance's recent settlement brings extensive internal monitoring, and the EU is exploring whether similar oversight could extend even into DeFi. Avoiding a future where crypto becomes a tool of financial surveillance will require the industry to take self-regulation seriously.

Some things, though, never change. As the industry makes its own return to the planet of the apes, will it keep 'disrupting' and 'innovating' toward a genuine future of finance — or simply rebuild another house of cards, primed to collapse again? Is there even a meaningful difference?