over seven million dollars stolen

Last night, the trading platform KiloEx announced that it had suffered a hack.

The hackers managed to steal 7.5 million dollars, and now the platform is trying to recover at least a part of it.

The operation of the platform has been suspended. 

The hack of the trading platform KiloEx

According to what declared by KiloEx, the Vault of the platform has been breached. 

The team also states that the attack was contained because they immediately suspended the use of the platform to avoid worse damage. 

The technical details of the attack have not been disclosed, but only that they are still analyzing it in collaboration with the crypto ecosystem partners to trace and recover the funds, where possible.

The full report of the incident will be published in the coming days.

In particular, the team has announced that they are collaborating with BNB Chain, Manta Network, and some partners for blockchain security (Seal-911, SlowMist, and Sherlock) to investigate the exploit of the KiloEx Vault. 

Currently, the only other known things are that the stolen funds are being routed through zkBridge and Meson, and that the platform is urgently trying to interact with both protocols to halt ongoing transactions and prevent further losses.

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KiloEx

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KiloEx is a DEX on BNB Chain, opBNB, Manta, and Base for trading of perpetual futures.

According to the data from DeFiLlama, it had a TVL greater than 42 million dollars yesterday before the attack, while now it has dropped to 34.

The maximum TVL ever reached by the platform was 51 million dollars at the beginning of this year, which is a decidedly contained TVL compared to other DEX. For example, Jupiter, the main DEX for derivatives by TVL, exceeds 1.4 billion dollars, and all the top ten DEX for derivatives with greater TVL exceed 50 million dollars. 

In fact, the first six all exceed 100 million, and actually hold a large part of the market share in this specific sector. 

Even regarding the trading volumes, KiloEx does not particularly shine. 

In fact, the best month in its history, from this point of view, turns out to have been December 2024, with more than 3.6 billion dollars, which, however, equate to a daily average of just over 116 million. 

Jupiter, for example, in January 2025 surpassed 36 billion in total trading volume, which is ten times that of KiloEx.

The hack attack against KiloEx

According to unofficial information, the KiloEx Vault has been attacked on multiple chains. 

Furthermore, there are rumors that the attacker used a Tornado Cash address to execute transactions on BNB, Base, and Taiko. 

A preliminary analysis suggests that the vulnerability may have been caused by access control issues in the price oracle. 

The cybersecurity company PeckShield claims that the funds stolen were 3.3 million dollars on Base, 3.1 million on opBNB, and 1 million on BSC. 

The hypothesis is that the information used by smart contracts to determine the price of an asset has been manipulated to illicitly cash in funds, and then withdraw them. 

The fact is that in this way it is possible to create individual transactions, no longer blockable or cancellable once recorded on-chain, with which to achieve enormous profits by manipulating exchange prices. 

According to the co-founder of the blockchain analysis company Fuzzland, Chaofan Shou, anyone can modify the price oracle of Kilo, because their smart contract checks that the caller is a reliable forwarder, but it verifies the forwarded caller.

It would therefore have been a very simple vulnerability to exploit. 

The reaction of the token KILO

The price of the platform’s native token, KILO, has crashed by 27%. 

Note that this drop, although very fast, has simply brought the price of KILO back to the levels of three days ago, so it even seems a bit forced to call it a drop. On the other hand, it seems possible that the platform may eventually resume operations, given that the attack was contained. 

Obviously, however, it will first need to resolve the vulnerability. 

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KILO landed on the crypto markets very recently, less than a month ago, and since then its price had already lost a lot, given that the all-time high is precisely the initial launch price, and compared to that high it is already losing 75%. 

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