Botched Infinite-Mint Attack on Raft Depegs R Stablecoin, Nets Exploiter Almost Nothing

Raft, the protocol behind the R stablecoin, was hit by an on-chain exploit on Friday that pushed R off its peg. Although the underlying infinite-mint bug was worth roughly $3.3 million on paper, the attacker's own execution error meant the funds never actually reached them.

Instead, 1,570 ETH ended up sent to Ethereum's burn address, and the attacker walked away roughly $8,000 poorer overall — an exploit that succeeded technically but backfired financially.

01Response timeline

Security firm Ancilia was first to flag the incident, and Raft's team confirmed it shortly after. About an hour later, the team posted this update:

Update: Further minting of R has been paused.

Existing users are still able to repay their positions and receive their collateral.

The following day, Raft told users a recovery plan was underway, while reiterating that anyone holding minted R could still redeem their collateral. The team also cautioned against trading the now partially unbacked token, stating:

The current version of Raft will be sunsetted.

02Mechanics of the exploit

The attacker inflated the apparent value of collateral by liquidating previously opened positions funded through an address holding a large amount of ETH obtained via flash loan. That artificially inflated collateral then let them mint 6.7 million R tokens, which were sold off for what should have been more than $3 million in profit.

Detailed technical breakdowns of the exploit were published by Ancilia, Igor Igamberdiev, and BlockSec, and Raft itself released a post-mortem.

The newly minted R was dumped straight into the existing liquidity pool, driving its price down sharply. Raft's underlying collateral reserves were unaffected by the attack, meaning users with an open CDP on the protocol could still return R and withdraw their collateral normally.

Key addresses and transactions:

• Attacker address: 0xc1f2b71a502b551a65eee9c96318afdd5fd439fa
• Attack transaction: 0xfeedbf51…
• Preparatory transaction: 0xa1378a4d…
• Exploited contract: 0x9ab6b21cdf116f611110b048987e58894786c244

03The exploiter's own mistake

Rather than reaching the attacker, the proceeds ended up sent to Ethereum's null address 0x0000. Igor Igamberdiev explained why:

The problem is that the code for converting R to ETH and transferring it to the exploiter was called from another contract using delegatecall

But delegatecall looks at the storage of the parent contract, in which the slot with the exploit address was not initialized

Despite the self-inflicted loss of funds, the attacker's underlying technique was sound rather than sloppy, as others in the security community noted.

04Audit history

Raft had undergone extensive review from four separate security firms, including Trail of Bits, plus a competitive audit contest run through Hats Finance. Even so, as has been noted before, audits alone are never a complete guarantee, and this incident reinforces the case for layered, ongoing security practices rather than a one-time audit checklist. With vulnerabilities still surfacing in well-established DeFi projects, no protocol can consider itself immune.