Whale Multisig $38M Hack: Key Compromise and a Hanging Long on Aave

Whale multisig $38M hack: Key compromise and a hanging long on Aave; part of the funds have already been laundered through Tornado Cash, while the attacker still controls a long on Aave. In particular, PeckShield records withdrawals of around $38M from the related addresses, and SpecterAnalyst warns about escalating on-chain risks and the need for tighter monitoring of fund flows. On-chain data shows how the same cluster of addresses is gradually moving assets through several wallets and routes, splitting amounts into smaller parts and sending them further down the chain.

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What PeckShield and SpecterAnalyst Data Actually Show

In its post, PeckShieldAlert visualizes the movement of funds from a single key address that accumulates assets and then sequentially distributes them to new wallets. The researcher links the attacker address 0x1fcf1F5C801feBc1009FcC8ED9c8349C367d23Ac to a Gnosis Safe contract that holds a large position on Aave v3 Core. At the time of the snapshots, Aave showed about $25M in ETH as collateral and roughly $12.3M in DAI debt, with a health factor of around 1.68. This means the attacker controls not only the assets already withdrawn through Tornado Cash, but also a highly leveraged ETH long that, if the market deteriorates, can be forcibly liquidated, locking in a total loss on the position for the victim and adding additional pressure on the market. As a result, the total scale of the outflows reaches roughly $38M, with the transfers carried out not in a single large transaction but as a series of operations that make simple tracking harder for retail users.

SpecterAnalyst also highlights additional context around the incident and draws attention to the pattern of activity across the addresses. The analyst emphasizes that this withdrawal pattern does not match the typical behavior of market makers or large traders and looks specifically like a deliberate capital drain in the context of a security incident.

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Risks for Users and Lessons for Infrastructure

For retail investors, the key risk in such incidents is that they often interact with addresses and contracts that outwardly appear legitimate and continue to accept deposits even after the outflows have begun. However, PeckShieldAlert shows how quickly a single address cluster can redistribute tens of millions of dollars across new wallets while users have not yet had time to adjust their behavior. In these conditions, the decisive factor becomes how quickly exchanges, wallets, and analytics providers flag suspicious addresses as high risk and update their blocklists and warning systems.

For infrastructure, the incident serves as another argument for building not only reactive investigative processes but also more proactive monitoring systems. Flows of about $38M concentrating around a limited number of on-chain nodes provide a sufficiently strong signal for automated alerting systems, but without rapid synchronization between exchanges, wallet providers, and analytics firms, such signals remain local for too long. Get more insights from our guides for beginners and professionals, and stay tuned for the latest updates and opportunities in the new economy, crypto industry, and blockchain developments!