Raydium Suffers $1.34 Million Exploit Targeting Deprecated Liquidity Pools

On June 10, 2026, Raydium, a decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Solana, experienced an exploit that resulted in a loss of more than $1.34 million. The attack targeted five deprecated liquidity pools associated with Raydium's legacy automated market maker program, which had already been phased out.

The hack allowed the attacker, utilizing a Solana address ending in "Bq33QVk," to bypass certain validation mechanisms in the older program, culminating in the unauthorized minting of new liquidity provider tokens. This led to the theft of nearly $900,000 in USDC, approximately $357,000 in SOL, and about $86,000 worth of Raydium's native token, RAY.

Raydium assured users that current functionalities were not compromised by this incident. A pseudonymous contributor to the platform, 0xInfra, stated, "No current users of Raydium are affected by this exploit or would have been able to interact with these pools through the UI since their deprecation." It was emphasized that the vulnerability arose not from a key compromise or authority-level issue but rather from the faults inherent in the legacy program.

This event aligns with a troubling trend in decentralized finance (DeFi), where multiple protocols have faced significant exploits. Earlier instances include the KelpDAO and Drift Protocol exploits in April, which collectively impacted close to $300 million. Moreover, concerns have arisen regarding the role of artificial intelligence in identifying vulnerabilities, as highlighted by a recent incident involving the privacy network Zcash, which suffered a market crash following the disclosure of a security issue discovered by an AI model.

Raydium plans to refund users affected by the exploit using resources from its treasury. As the decentralized finance landscape continues to evolve, Raydium’s incident underscores ongoing security challenges for DeFi protocols.