Summary
Moby Trade (moby.trade) is an on-chain options protocol built on Arbitrum and Berachain, launched in 2024 and backed by an Arbitrum Foundation grant. On January 8, 2025, the protocol suffered a critical security breach when a private key controlling proxy admin contracts was compromised, resulting in approximately $2.5 million in user funds being drained; roughly $1.5 million was subsequently recovered through an intervention by the SEAL911 security team. The protocol resumed operations after the incident and expanded to Berachain mainnet in February 2025, but the unrecovered ~$1 million in ETH and WBTC was routed through privacy mixers including Railgun and Tornado Cash, leaving those funds effectively unrecoverable.
Connected Entities
2 entitiesTimeline(10 events)
2024-01-23
Moby receives Arbitrum Foundation grant, becoming the first on-chain options protocol to receive such a grant prior to mainnet launch.
2024-04-08
Moby Trade launches on Arbitrum mainnet.
2024-09-27
Attacker's funding address withdraws 0.9706 ETH from Tornado Cash, later identified as pre-attack infrastructure preparation.
2025-01-08
Private key compromise: attacker tests exploit on Arbitrum Sepolia at 11:56 UTC, executes malicious contract upgrade on mainnet at 12:53 UTC, and drains S_VAULT and M_VAULT between 15:24 and 16:48 UTC, stealing approximately $2.47 million in wETH, wBTC, and USDC.
2025-01-08
SEAL911 and MEV researcher Tony Ke recover approximately $1.47 million USDC by exploiting an unprotected upgrade function in the attacker's own malicious contract, finishing 30 seconds behind the attacker.
2025-01-08
Remaining stolen ETH and WBTC begin dispersal across 35+ wallet addresses; 9.5634 ETH routed through Railgun privacy protocol.
2025-01-10
Moby Trade publishes incident report; users urged to revoke token approvals. Protocol operations suspended.
2025-01-13
Target date for initial compensation payments to affected options holders.
2025-01-15
Protocol operations resume with enhanced security measures including key separation and multi-step verification.
2025-02-17
Moby Trade expands to Berachain mainnet, integrating with Berachain's Proof of Liquidity mechanism. Moby is selected for Berachain's Request for Application program.
Decision Log
- hash: wpTyQpAonPdwu2RBkJeWQSVMN3YRqKBDJyQRn1wmGpP
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain and source URLs are archived via the Internet Archive.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 5/4/2026, 2:54:26 AM
last updated: 5/28/2026, 2:27:02 AM
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