Beluga(@heybeluga):Last week a hacker drained $500K USDC from a Base vault, then lost most of it to MEV seconds later. Was it a costly mistake or part of the plan? Hacker Blunder or 4D Chess? ↓ We know it was a phishing attack that got the victim to sign a malicious transaction draining the vault. 16 seconds after the hacker received the funds, they used a Uniswap V4 pool with thin liquidity to swap the USDC for wrapped ETH, still on Base. During the swap, they had no slippage limit and got MEVd for over $370,000. Net net, they ended up with $129,000. The funds remain in the same Base wallet. Why would this happen? What kind of person is competent enough to hack a crypto vault but incompetent enough to lose most of it to basic MEV? On the surface, the hacker had to move quickly because Circle, the company that controls USDC, has freeze permissions. Once an address is frozen, it can’t transfer USDC. It makes sense that they would be in a hurry to get to WETH and be willing to pay whatever was required to do it fast. Now that the funds are in WETH on Base, they can’t be frozen by Circle. Base could theoretically halt the entire blockchain but can’t simply freeze a singular WETH address the way Circle can with USDC. There’s no world where Base would stop the blockchain over one relatively small drain, so the funds are effectively safe from that type of intervention. In spite of the fees, $129,000 is better than nothing. The hacker had to go fast, but with some basic slippage guidelines, they could’ve walked away with much more with essentially no additional risk. Option 1: The hacker accidentally forget to set slippage, it was karma for hacking. Option 2: This MEV attack was a sophisticated form of money laundering. What if the MEV attack was intentional? The hacker could’ve created or controlled a MEV bot beforehand and set it up to sandwich their transaction the moment it hit the liquidity pool. Instead of actually losing $370,000, transferred most of the stolen value to a second wallet through what looks onchain like an unrelated MEV extraction. Everyone thinks the hacker is an idiot. What do you think happened?

2026.08.10 15:38

Last week a hacker drained $500K USDC from a Base vault, then lost most of it to MEV seconds later. Was it a costly mistake or part of the plan? Hacker Blunder or 4D Chess? ↓ We know it was a phishing attack that got the victim to sign a malicious transaction draining the vault. 16 seconds after the hacker received the funds, they used a Uniswap V4 pool with thin liquidity to swap the USDC for wrapped ETH, still on Base. During the swap, they had no slippage limit and got MEVd for over $370,000. Net net, they ended up with $129,000. The funds remain in the same Base wallet. Why would this happen? What kind of person is competent enough to hack a crypto vault but incompetent enough to lose most of it to basic MEV? On the surface, the hacker had to move quickly because Circle, the company that controls USDC, has freeze permissions. Once an address is frozen, it can’t transfer USDC. It makes sense that they would be in a hurry to get to WETH and be willing to pay whatever was required to do it fast. Now that the funds are in WETH on Base, they can’t be frozen by Circle. Base could theoretically halt the entire blockchain but can’t simply freeze a singular WETH address the way Circle can with USDC. There’s no world where Base would stop the blockchain over one relatively small drain, so the funds are effectively safe from that type of intervention. In spite of the fees, $129,000 is better than nothing. The hacker had to go fast, but with some basic slippage guidelines, they could’ve walked away with much more with essentially no additional risk. Option 1: The hacker accidentally forget to set slippage, it was karma for hacking. Option 2: This MEV attack was a sophisticated form of money laundering. What if the MEV attack was intentional? The hacker could’ve created or controlled a MEV bot beforehand and set it up to sandwich their transaction the moment it hit the liquidity pool. Instead of actually losing $370,000, transferred most of the stolen value to a second wallet through what looks onchain like an unrelated MEV extraction. Everyone thinks the hacker is an idiot. What do you think happened?

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