dYdX v3: Market Manipulation (Low-Liquidity Token — YFI Long + Spot Dump)
A single actor pumped dYdX's YFI open interest from $0.8M to $67M over several days, then crashed YFI's spot price to force $9M in insurance fund losses — a targeted, multi-day market manipulation that followed a failed dry run on the SUSHI market two weeks earlier.
Summary #
dYdX v3 suffered a Derivatives / Perpetuals DEX on 2023-11-20, resulting in a loss of approximately $9M.
What happened #
A single actor pumped dYdX's YFI open interest from $0.8M to $67M over several days, then crashed YFI's spot price to force $9M in insurance fund losses — a targeted, multi-day market manipulation that followed a failed dry run on the SUSHI market two weeks earlier.
Linked factors #
- RD-F-007 — related : Bug bounty absent — baseline integrity gap [via dashboard_risk_factors/Bug bounty: Unknown]
- RD-F-053 — causal : ★ Spot DEX pool oracle without TWAP — root cause [via realtime_signals/Oracle anomaly: Y — YFI spot price crashed 40% in a manipulated move; the oracle used for liquidation pricing reflected the manipulated spot price]
- RD-F-099 — illustrative : Oracle price deviation > X% from secondary source — RT signal would have fired [via realtime_signals/Oracle anomaly: Y — YFI spot price crashed 40% in a manipulated move; the oracle used for liquidation pricing reflected the manipulated spot price]