What Happened
The incident was first surfaced by on-chain researcher Tahax. According to detailed transaction analysis, the root cause was a silent ownership transfer of the legacy locker contract that occurred around 269 days ago. The attacker gained control and routed it through roughly 80 intermediate wallets to hide their tracks.
The primary attacker address 0xC457…FA69 which received funding from Bybit shortly before the exploit deployed a custom drainer contract and executed the following key actions:
- Drastically reduced or removed locking fees
- Backdated unlock timestamps all the way to the year 1970
- Withdrew LP tokens from more than 1,400 pools in a coordinated operation
- Swapped the stolen assets primarily into $BNB
The attacker then transferred around 2,958 $BNB (worth roughly $1.87 million) to intermediary wallets, which later deposited funds into multiple Binance addresses. Portions of the stolen liquidity were routed through cross-chain mixers, making full tracing difficult.
Deeper Concerns: Legacy Infrastructure Risk
This was not a traditional smart contract vulnerability but the result of retained administrative privileges on an unverified legacy contract. Community discussions suggest the backdoor may have been known and exploited selectively as early as August 2025, with individuals in Telegram groups reportedly advertising access to old DxSale locks.
DxSale Background
DxSale was a dominant liquidity locker during the 2021 bull run, widely used by hundreds of new token launches including high-profile projects like SafeMoon to lock LP tokens and assure investors that liquidity could not be pulled immediately. It played a key role in building initial trust for many memecoins and DeFi projects at the time.
This incident adds to the growing list of 2026 security events that expose weaknesses in older infrastructure, poor key management, and unrenounced administrative controls. on the $BNB Chain. It comes after a recent exploit on the same network that drained roughly $187k from AM Token and Wukong staking contracts.
The bigger picture? In DeFi, locked liquidity is only as safe as the ownership model behind it. Proper verification, ownership renunciation, and ongoing monitoring are now essential, even for long-dormant contracts.