The decentralized cryptocurrency exchange GMX has faced a serious hacking attack, resulting in the theft of approximately $40 million. The incident occurred in the GMX V1 liquidity pool on the Arbitrum blockchain — this version of the platform became vulnerable to malicious actors.
This is reported by Finway
Details of the Attack and GMX Team’s Response
The vulnerability affected the GLP pool, which combines Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and other assets, and serves as the primary source of liquidity for the platform. Upon discovering the attack, the GMX team promptly suspended trading on GMX V1 and halted the issuance and redemption of GLP tokens on the Arbitrum and Avalanche networks. Users were urged to disable leverage and review their settings to avoid potential losses in the future.
GMX experts emphasized that the new version of the platform, GMX V2, its GMX token, and other liquidity pools remained untouched and were not affected by the incident. The company SlowMist explained that the hackers managed to exploit a flaw in the asset management calculation mechanism, allowing them to manipulate the price of GLP.
“Using a reentrancy attack, they successfully opened large short positions to manipulate global average prices, artificially inflating GLP prices within a single transaction and profiting from redemption operations,” the analysts’ report stated.
Hacking Attacks on the DeFi Market in 2025
The incident with GMX is yet another in a series of large-scale attacks on cryptocurrency projects in 2025. In the first half of the year, the total losses in the industry due to hacking activities have already exceeded $2.1 billion. Notably, among the most significant cases are the hack of the Bybit exchange with a loss of $1.46 billion and the attack on the Iranian platform Nobitex, which lost $81 million.
GMX announced the start of an investigation and focused on mitigating the consequences of the attack. Experts note that it is critically important for DeFi platforms to pay attention to security during the development of pools and pricing mechanisms to prevent similar incidents in the future.