$TRU On The Ropes After Preventable Crypto Hack

Once considered part of a solid financing project, Truebit may be finished after 2026’s first major crypto hack. An attacker was able to drain the $TRU token for about $26 million worth of ETH, but it’s not so much the loss of funds as the way in which they were stolen.

The attacker, who remains unknown, was able to exploit an out-of-date legacy smart contract from years prior (near the project’s launch). The contract was vulnerable to a flawed addition operation allowing for an overflow error that could be abused to set the token price to zero for purchase. Though the attackers abused a seemingly overlooked and forgotten out-of-date component, the multiple phases in which the crypto hack might have been noticed and caught before it could be carried out have raised questions about the project’s fundamental viability as its token value has plummeted to just a penny of USD.

Out-of-date smart contract went unnoticed, did not have supplemental security

Investors and token holders are raising serious questions about the project’s security auditing and monitoring in the wake of the crypto hack, as the five-year-old smart contract that was exploited was well out of date and had seemingly been tested by the attackers several times in the months leading up to the attack. Security researchers believe the attackers abused the flawed contract to make nearly-free acquisitions of the token ranging from $2,000 to $15,000 several times in test runs throughout late 2025, seemingly without raising any alarms.

History shows that the vast majority of projects that suffer this type of devastating hack do not recover. The token dropped to just slightly over 1 cent USD after news of the crypto hack broke and has seen very little movement as trading of it has almost totally evaporated. This fits a usual post-hack pattern as liquidity pulls out due to lack of trust; general comments on forums and social media also indicate a broad swathe of traders have lost confidence in the project going forward.

It remains unknown exactly who pulled off the hack, but eyes will naturally turn toward North Korea’s “Lazarus” and its other similar state-backed hacking groups infamous for sniffing out DeFi security vulnerabilities. Though some analysts think the rogue state may be changing focus to more traditional cyber espionage, the hackers nevertheless had another very good year for themselves in 2025 with a total of $2.02 billion taken from assorted crypto hacks.

Crypto hack provided TRU for free, quickly swapped to ETH

Whatever the case, the 8,535 ETH (about $26.4 million) the attackers wound up with is very unlikely to be recovered. Forensic analysis indicates the attackers immediately took at least half of it to Tornado Cash for laundering.

The vulnerable smart contract made use of an older version of the Solidity programming language (0.6.1) that has obvious gaps in its overflow checks. This can be fixed by using the SafeMath library, which did not happen in this case. The Solidity team responded to the crypto hack by assuring users that modern versions (0.8 being the most recent) have already addressed this vulnerability.

The incident does not help DeFi’s general security reputation, which continues to struggle. Legitimacy of a project and being established for some time is usually a key factor for investors, but this crypto hack throws that aspect into some doubt as well. The incident once again highlights the general need for better monitoring, better auditing by trusted and reputable third parties, and good bug bounty programs.