Curve Finance

Documented and closed events. They stay on file: an operator’s past is data, not a verdict.

1. Jul 30, 2023 Hack / funds theft Critical $75M ✓ resolved

   Vyper compiler bug: four pools drained for about 74.5 million dollars. Reimbursement voted in December 2023, but 42 of the 49.2 million paid in vested CRV tokens

   On 30 July 2023, between 13:10 and 22:00 UTC, four Curve pools were drained one after another. The flaw was not in Curve's code: it was in the compiler. Versions 0.2.15, 0.2.16 and 0.3.0 of the Vyper language produced a reentrancy guard that did not work — the lock was there in the source and absent from the compiled contract. Whoever wrote those pools had done the right thing and was exposed anyway. The bug had been fixed in version 0.3.1, but the contracts already deployed were the old ones. THE POOLS AND THE FIGURES, ONE BY ONE (LlamaRisk analysis): pETH/ETH, 6,106.65 WETH (~11 million dollars); msETH/ETH, 866.55 WETH (~1.6 million) and 959.71 msETH (~1.8 million); alETH/ETH, 7,258.70 WETH (~13.6 million) and 4,821.55 alETH (~9 million); CRV/ETH, 7,193,401.77 CRV (~5.1 million at the time of the attack), 7,680.49 WETH (~14.2 million) and 2,879.65 ETH (~5.4 million). Total around 74.5 million dollars. Press estimates range between 52 and 74 million depending on what is counted and at which prices: the figure here is the one from the technical summary, with the per-pool detail so it can be checked. WHAT CAME BACK ON ITS OWN. Part of the funds was extracted ahead of the attackers by whitehat operators: 2,879.65 ETH (~5.4 million) taken out of the CRV/ETH pool by c0ffeebabe.eth were returned to the Curve team. Other funds were handed back by the attacker to Alchemix and JPEG'd after those projects offered the 10% bug bounty reward. The other pools were not so lucky. THE REIMBURSEMENT, AND THE DETAIL THAT CHANGES WHAT THE WORD MEANS. On 21 December 2023 governance approved, with 94% of the vote, the distribution of about 49.2 million dollars to the affected liquidity providers in the Curve, JPEG'd, Alchemix and Metronome pools. Of that, about 7.2 million were ETH actually recovered; the remaining roughly 42 million were paid in CRV tokens subject to vesting, drawn from the community fund (55,544,782.73 CRV approved in total). Put another way: those who had put ETH into the pools largely got back the protocol's governance token, released over time and at a price that can move in any direction. It is a real, voted reimbursement rather than a promise — but it is not the same thing as getting back what was deposited, and this page does not write it as if it were. WHY IT STILL MATTERS. The case is closed, the lesson is not: the risk was neither in the contract nor in that contract's audits — the audits existed — but one layer below, in the compiler, which none of the checks in use was looking at.

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2. Aug 9, 2022 Hack / funds theft Severe $573K ✓ resolved

   curve.fi DNS hijack: for about an hour the official site served a clone that drained wallets, over 573,000 dollars taken from users

   On 9 August 2022 the nameserver for the curve.fi domain was compromised at the registrar iwantmyname. Anyone typing the official address landed on an identical copy of the site which, instead of the normal operations, asked users to sign an approval in favour of an attacker-controlled contract: funds were pulled from the victim's own wallet, not from the protocol's reserves. Curve raised the alarm from its official account — «don't use the site, the nameserver is compromised» — and about an hour later announced it had found and reverted the configuration, urging anyone who had approved contracts on Curve in the preceding hours to revoke those approvals «immediately». Specialist press reconstructions put the amount taken in that window at slightly over 573,000 dollars. TWO THINGS TO KEEP SEPARATE. Curve's smart contracts were not touched: liquidity providers in the pools lost nothing from this event. Those who lost money were users who signed on the fake site during that hour. It is an attack on the service's web layer, not on the protocol — but it is still a fact about the service, because the hijacked domain was its own. WHAT DID NOT HAPPEN. No restitution to the affected users is on record: the 573,000 dollars never came back. The case is closed in the sense that the domain was recovered the same day, not in the sense that anyone was repaid. THE PRECEDENT THAT MATTERS. The registrar involved, iwantmyname, is the same one as in the May 2025 hijack recorded below: the same external dependency failed twice three years apart, and it is the reason Curve abandoned the .fi domain in 2025.

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3. May 12, 2025 Major outage Moderate ✓ resolved

   curve.fi domain hijacked again at the same registrar: official site replaced by a decoy asking for signatures. Contracts and funds untouched, permanent migration to curve.finance

   On 12 May 2025 at 20:55 UTC the curve.fi domain was hijacked at registrar level: the attackers altered the DNS delegation and the official address began pointing to a site mimicking Curve's homepage. The team noticed at 21:20 UTC. WHAT WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE. According to Curve's own account the fake site was «a static decoy that did not function as a real frontend and only attempted to prompt users for wallet signatures». No smart contract, no funds and no user data were touched: the protocol stayed «fully secure and operational» and processed over 400 million dollars in volume during the outage, because anyone operating through contracts or alternative interfaces does not go through the domain. The perimeter, the company says, was «strictly limited to the DNS layer». Wallet providers such as Phantom took part in the response, blocking access to the compromised site. THE DECISION THAT FOLLOWED. Curve did not wait to get the domain back: it moved the official frontend to curve.finance and recommended reaching the protocol through the ENS domain curve.eth. The stated reason is the extended downtime and the limited support received from the .fi registrar, iwantmyname — the same registrar as the August 2022 hijack. On the exact cause the company says it detected no sign of its own credentials being compromised and that the investigation remained open. WHY IT IS HERE. There was no theft from the protocol's reserves, which is why this entry is not classified as a hack. But for hours the address people know by heart served a trap: for the user the service could not be reached safely, and that is exactly the kind of fact this page has to declare.

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verified on Sep 27, 2026