Summary

• A hacker made away with some 471 ETH following an attack on Base-DEX, RocketSwap.
• Funds were moved to Ethereum and a memecoin was made, with stolen ETH used to seed its Uniswap liquidity pool.
• This is just the latest in a string of controversial episodes surround Coinbase’s new Base Network.

As reported by security company PeckShield, the Base Network decentralized exchange (DEX), RocketSwap, has been hacked for 471 ETH - currently equivalent to around $860,000.

Immediately following the attack, the culprit bridged the stolen funds to Ethereum mainnet and proceeded to incept what appears to be a memecoin called LoveRCKT. The hacker then seeded a Uniswap liquidity pool with some 90 trillion $LoveRCKT tokens, paired against 400 ETH. 

‍RocketSwap’s Response to the Hack

Despite accusations on social media that RocketSwap’s team were behind the attack, claiming it was in fact a rug-pull, the internal team are insistent that the incident involved an external malicious actor.

In particular, RocketSwap highlights that the vulnerability originated from their use of offline signatures which, following a brute force attack, allowed the hacker to effectively drain user funds from RocketSwap’s farms.

Base Network Woes

This marks the second attack on an application hosted by Coinbase’s new Base Network. The first came in late July when LeetSwap, at the time Base’s leading DEX, was exploited for around 340 ETH. 

In addition to the exploits, comes the infamous $BALD memecoin, which was rug-pulled when some 6,800 ETH was pulled from its liquidity pool on LeetSwap. 

Since its mainnet was opened on July 13, Base has been mired in controversy, despite its high-profile and much anticipated entry into the blockchain ecosystem.