$42M Stolen in GMX Hack, Hacker Offered Bounty
A sophisticated breach has struck the decentralized trading platform GMX, with over $42 million in crypto assets drained from its liquidity pool in what’s being described as one of the most damaging exploits of the year.
The incident, which unfolded on July 9, saw the attacker exploit GMX’s GLP pool and proceed to funnel funds across multiple networks in a calculated maneuver designed to obscure their trail. Blockchain investigators at PeckShield were quick to detect and trace the breach, reporting that nearly $10 million was moved to Ethereum shortly after the initial exploit.
The attacker employed an intricate strategy—first extracting USDC, then converting it into ETH, and eventually shifting a portion into DAI. Additional tokens, including FRAX, WBTC, and WETH, were also swept in the exploit. Complex token swaps and cross-chain transactions were used to fragment and conceal the loot.
In a last-ditch effort to negotiate, GMX reached out directly on-chain, offering the attacker a deal: return 90% of the funds and keep 10%—around $4.2 million—as a “white-hat” reward. The offer came with a 48-hour deadline and the promise of no legal action if the hacker complied.
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However, according to on-chain data from Arkham Intelligence, the address linked to the breach is still holding close to $44 million. So far, the funds remain untouched, and no response has been observed.
GMX, which operates primarily on the Arbitrum network and offers leveraged trading for top assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, is expected to publish a full post-mortem analysis. In the meantime, the incident has reignited broader concerns about protocol-level security in decentralized finance.
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
