a hacker found a $7.45m door. a robot walked through it first.

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evening. a hacker burned 12 throwaway contract deployments to claim the one address a $7.45m wallet had trusted since march. a trading bot copied him and went first, in the same block, and is now haggling over a bounty. that's the big one. also: a prediction market's users lost ~$400k after a docs site was likely compromised, visa, polygon and hedera all shipped the same idea (a spending cap for ai agents), and a new chain wants agents that can't be switched off.

the permission. a trading team ran a 2-of-7 multisig (a safe) on avalanche. on march 7, 2026 at 16:10 utc it signed a batch of unlimited token approvals for wavax, usdc, weth.e and btc.b to one address, 0x3725…155d. on base, arbitrum and ethereum that address is the team's own pool contract. on avalanche it was empty. nobody revoked the approvals. (the crypto times, defimon alerts)

the forged door. that address isn't random. it's simply what safe's public createcall contract produces on its 13th deployment, and createcall had never been used on avalanche. so anyone could "become" it. a fresh wallet deployed createcall through the safe singleton factory, ran 12 throwaway deployments to advance the nonce, then placed a sweeper contract at exactly 0x3725…155d and pulled every approved balance: about $7.45m. (the crypto times, defimon alerts)

the robot got there first. an mev bot copied the attack and front-ran it in the same block, taking 3.09m usdc, 350,400 wavax, 182 weth.e and 10.79 btc.b. the attacker's own transaction failed (oct 26, 12:56 utc, "multicall3: call failed"). defimon alerts, a monitoring service, reported the incident; it says it detected it at 13:00:23 utc. from 13:48 utc the signers emptied its safes on hyperevm, base, robinhood chain, bsc and ethereum into one fresh address that now holds about $38.7m. (the crypto times, defimon alerts)

the haggle. the bot calls itself a whitehat. in on-chain messages it promised to return the funds "within the next few hours" and asked for a 5–10% bounty. the owners offered 42,500 wavax (~$371k), roughly 5% of the haul; a follow-up message on oct 27 says the bot can keep that if it sends the rest. as of tuesday the funds still sit at 0x11eb…9bc5. return pending. (the crypto times, defimon alerts, snowtrace)

why it matters. nobody broke the lock. two of seven keys were never stolen, and safe's code worked as designed. the hole was a seven-month-old "yes" to an address that only meant something on some chains. the same address on different chains can be different contracts, and on a quiet chain it can be claimed by whoever deploys there first. the fix is boring: never give unlimited approvals to an address you don't control on that chain, and revoke the ones you don't need (approval checkers are in our tools catalog). it's the same lesson as #006's weak wallet seeds and #013's steal-my-bitcoin server: the chain wasn't hacked, a setting was. and the "hero" here is a profit-seeking bot, so the refund depends on a negotiation, not a law. more: crypto

a prediction market's users lost ~$400k. the suspect: its docs site. on oct 27 onchain lens flagged about $300k in suspected exploit funds at predict fun, a prediction market on bnb chain, routed through intermediary wallets and the relay bridge into tornado cash. one tracker counted 19 affected accounts, with transfers between 05:50 and 06:05 utc; another estimated more than $400k. (the crypto times)

predict fun then confirmed unauthorized transfers from "a small number of users" totaling about 400,000 usdt. its preliminary finding: the api documentation site, hosted by a third-party provider, may have been compromised for a limited time. the site is offline, the team says it will fully reimburse affected users, and a post-mortem is promised. no root cause yet, so treat details as early. (the crypto times)

visa, polygon and hedera all shipped the same thing: a leash for ai agents. on oct 20 visa, bill and billtrust launched what they call the first live pilot where trusted ai agents complete already-approved invoice payments end-to-end inside supplier portals, using visa's trusted agent protocol and tokenized credentials. it is live and processing real transactions. (visa)

on the crypto side, polygon added agent spend controls (oct 21): a budget, approved contracts and methods, and an expiry, enforced on-chain and revocable at any time. hedera's agent accounts do the same with daily and per-transaction caps and an allowlist; a limited testnet is due in q4 2026, mainnet targeted for q2 2027. read it next to the big one: the hard part of machine money isn't speed, it's a capped, revocable permission. the avalanche safe had the opposite, an unlimited one. (see also #011: banks vs ai agents.) (polygon, hedera)

a new chain wants ai agents that can't be switched off. ritual, founded by ex-polychain partners niraj pant and akilesh potti, launched ritual chain, an evm layer 1 where agents hold their own non-custodial wallets, run inside trusted hardware (tees), and get restarted by a protocol "heartbeat" if they stop. the company claims a testnet since june with 40m+ transactions, sub-300 ms blocks, 15 native precompiles, a zellic audit and $30m+ raised from archetype and polychain. this is a press release, so all numbers are ritual's own. and note the tension: the same week everyone else is building off-switches, ritual is selling persistence. (decrypt / chainwire)

as of ~17:35 cet, oct 27 (coingecko):

green into the fed's oct 27–28 meeting. more by topic: markets

defimon: the defi exploit-detection feed (built by security firm decurity) that surfaced today's safe story. it watches ethereum, bnb chain, arbitrum, polygon, optimism, base, avalanche and hyperliquid, and streams exploit alerts that are double-checked by an llm before they go out. free public telegram alerts (~24h delay); defimon signals $50/mo; real-time websocket api $200/mo. for protocol teams, treasuries and anyone running a multisig. (defimon reported the incident; nothing links it to the mev bot.) more picks in the gweiwire tools catalog.

does the bot actually send it back? the terms are on-chain: keep 42,500 wavax, return the rest. if the transfers land, it's a cheap lesson. if they don't, "whitehat" was just a word in a transaction memo.

that's the wire. check your approvals tonight. back tomorrow. — gweiwire

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