Rhea Finance experiences a loss of $18.4 million due to an unexpected attack., 2026/04/18 15:22:29

The decentralized platform Rhea Finance has reported an attack on its lending protocol. An unidentified hacker managed to withdraw crypto assets totaling $18.4 million. This amount is more than double the initial loss estimate of $7.6 million that the platform had anticipated.

The Rhea Finance team explained that the attack targeted the margin trading feature. The hacker exploited a vulnerability in the slippage protection mechanism, extracting $18.4 million from the protocol’s reserve pool. The attacker opened numerous margin trading positions and subsequently directed the borrowed tokens into fake pools, while only a small amount of tokens was returned to the protocol. Consequently, the positions remained under-collateralized, leading to their liquidation and depleting the protocol’s reserve pool.

Later, the perpetrator returned 3.359 million USDC and 1.564 million NEAR to the RHEA credit contract, while 4.34 million USDT were frozen. The issuer, Tether, blocked 3.291 million USDT at the hacker’s address, and 1.053 million USDT were frozen in NEAR Intents.

The protocol has suspended the affected smart contracts. The Rhea Finance team stated that they are attempting to reach out to the hacker to request the return of the remaining assets. The platform has involved law enforcement in the investigation and centralized exchanges in tracking the funds. Rhea Finance has promised compensation and the return of funds to users, although they have not yet provided detailed information regarding the payouts.

Recently, the Hyperbridge protocol also fell victim to a hacking incident, but the attacker gained a modest profit of only 108 ETH after creating 1 billion fake DOT tokens. Earlier in March, the crypto platform Solv Protocol was attacked and lost $2.7 million.