The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M

timbowhite 78 points 105 comments March 23, 2026
www.chainalysis.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (19 comments)

dmitrygr

Self-Funding Bug Bounties strike again.

le-mark

Tl;dr another bug in a smart contract exploited, hacker got away clean.

dafelst

But guys, what you don't understand is that the code IS the contract!!! That means you don't even NEED regulation!!

m0llusk

stable as in house always wins?

outside2344

How is this industry still an industry?

consumer451

Oh wow, there's another interesting story on that site: > Trump Administration Likely to Un-ban Bitcoin Mixers, Dept. of Treasury Says They are “Not Unlawful” https://bfmtimes.com/trump-likely-to-un-ban-bitcoin-mixers/

primitivesuave

Missing from the article - the hacker first compromised Resolv Lab's AWS account, took a private key from KMS that was used to control minting, then managed to extract $25 million into ETH before all protocol functions were suspended.

andai

If the admins can "lock all transactions", what's the point of it being a crypto?

AIorNot

dang.. stealing money from fools and speculators.

tekla

Hacker? The coins were minted with perfectly valid code.

s_u_d_o

And what happened next? He mixed those coins? Transformed them into monero?

amarant

What is the point of stable coins? Like why does anyone buy them? It seems to me that their initial value is 1usd per token (or some other fiat I guess) and that's also the roof of their value: they kinda guarantee that they won't become more valuable than that. They are less usable than fiat: more businesses accept fiat than crypto, especially weird and small coins like all stable coins are. There isn't really a floor to their value, as demonstrated here. I see plenty of downsides of owning one of these coins, but not a single upside? Yet people apparently do buy them, so what is the upside? There must surely be something that's good about them?

Aurornis

According to a writeup at https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/lessons-from-the-resolv-hac... this started with a plain old hack that compromised their signing key. They also had a smart contract which didn't do some proper checks, but the hack was only possible with the stolen private key. Whoever held the private key was able to mint a lot of money, unchecked. So there was a traditional hack at the core of this heist, not just a smart contract exploit.

onemoresoop

Could this be an inside job?

FpUser

>"However, the hacker was only able to siphon off $25 million; the rest was locked into the protocol after system admins got alerted." "Only" ?!!! Poor thing.

RS-232

Has to be an inside job. One doesn’t just simultaneously hack into an AWS account, know exactly which key is needed for coin minting, and know internal details necessary to exploit a smart contract. The nature of the hack practically reveals their identity.

gverrilla

not even news.

Panzer04

Why does everything have to be written by an AI?

cameldrv

You shouldn't have a key that controls millions/billions of dollars on a cloud service. It should be on an airgapped laptop that was purchased anonymously, has never been connected to the Internet, and only runs software that has been vetted and loaded onto it via a CD-ROM or some other comparable method.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
3,471 stories · 32,344 chunks indexed