Stablecoin DEX Saddle Finance hacked for $10 million

Saddle Finance, a decentralized exchange for trading stablecoins, was hacked in a DeFi exploit today.

The unknown hacker carried out the exploit at 07:40 AM UTC and netted over $10 million in ether cryptocurrency, according to on-chain data.

Saddle Finance confirmed the incident, saying its team was investigating a "possible exploit." 

A smart contract audit firm called BlockSec was the first to notify Saddle. Interestingly, BlockSec was able to rescue $3.8 million from the exploiters with an "internal system" that can detect and front-run hacking incidents using off-chain arbitrage bots called flashbots, it told The Block in a Twitter message.

"The project was taken for around 4,900 ether ($13.8 million). Among them, 1,360 ether ($3.8 million) was rescued by us," BlockSec said.

Still, the hacker made off with more than $10 million in ETH from Saddle’s liquidity pools. Saddle Finance said it was in the process of recovering the $3.8 million from BlockSec.