Saddle Finance
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Saddle Finance was an Ethereum-based automated market maker (AMM) optimized for pegged-value assets such as stablecoins and wrapped BTC, founded in 2020 and launched in January 2021. The protocol suffered a critical exploit on April 30, 2022, when an attacker leveraged an unpatched MetaSwapUtils library bug to drain approximately $11 million via flash-loan-assisted price manipulation, with $3.8 million subsequently rescued by security firm BlockSec. The protocol formally wound down in September 2023 following a DAO vote (SIP-54) triggered in part by the broader DeFi security climate after the Curve Finance hack.
Connected Entities
12 entities · 60 linked investigations- Saddle Finance→mentioned with→Optimism(60%)
- Saddle Finance→mentioned with→Ethereum(80%)
- Saddle Finance→mentioned with→Arbitrum(65%)
- Saddle Finance→mentioned with→Coinbase(65%)
- Saddle Finance→mentioned with→Amazon(60%)
- Ethereum→mentioned with→Coinbase(60%)
- Optimism→mentioned with→Arbitrum(65%)
- Optimism→mentioned with→Ethereum(80%)
- Optimism→mentioned with→Coinbase(60%)
- Euler Finance→mentioned with→Ethereum(80%)
- + 19 more
Timeline(11 events)
19 January 2021
Saddle Finance launches on Ethereum mainnet and simultaneously closes $4.3 million seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Polychain Capital, Alameda Research, and others.
19 January 2021
Within six minutes of launch, three arbitrageurs extract approximately 7.9 BTC (~$275,000) from newly seeded pools by exploiting price imbalances; team response places responsibility on users.
20 January 2021
Curve Finance publicly accuses Saddle Finance of copying its StableSwap algorithm without attribution, citing a Quantstamp audit finding that Saddle's code was ported directly from Curve's contracts.
11 November 2021
Saddle raises $7.5 million Series A round led by Electric Capital, bringing total funding to approximately $11.8 million.
November 2021
Forks of Saddle's code (Nerve Finance, Synapse Protocol) are exploited using the MetaSwapUtils VirtualPrice pricing bug, alerting the Saddle team to the vulnerability class.
December 2021
Saddle deploys a patched MetaSwapUtils library addressing the VirtualPrice LP token calculation bug, but fails to migrate existing sUSD metapool to use the corrected code.
30 April 2022
Attacker (0x63341ba917de90498f3903b199df5699b4a55ac0, funded via Tornado Cash) drains approximately 3,932 ETH (~$11 million) from the sUSD-saddleUSD-V2 metapool across two successful flash-loan exploit transactions.
30 April 2022
BlockSec detects the exploit in real time and executes rescue transaction 0x9549c0cb... at block 14684434, recovering approximately 1,360 ETH ($3.8 million) from a blocked third attack attempt.
30 April 2022
Rari Capital and Fei Protocol suffer a separate $80 million reentrancy exploit on the same day, compounding DeFi sector stress.
8 August 2023
Founder Sunil Srivatsa submits SIP-54 to Saddle DAO proposing protocol wind-down by September 30, 2023, citing the Curve Finance hack as a renewed reminder of smart contract risk.
30 September 2023
Saddle Finance formally shuts down; all pools paused, community multisig dissolved, DAO treasury distributed to SDL and veSDL token holders as ARB airdrop.
Decision Log
- hash: GvqTBmiZ2z3PNvpXhKtD7WLYYWEZnx548AeX92yivgzq
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain (1 event). 11 of 17 cited source URLs have an Internet Archive snapshot.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 5/4/2026, 2:54:49 AM
last updated: 8/30/2026, 4:24:09 PM
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