Aave Loop Safe Module exploit: 114 ETH into Railgun in 98 minutes, and a bounty offer that came four hours late

FlashLoopAdapter (0x16bb8b912da187870c23ec6756bb3fad061283d8) is a Safe module: a Safe that enables it lets the adapter open and close looped positions on Aave v3, where weETH is deposited as collateral, ether is borrowed against it and deposited again. SlowMist and Defimon Alerts reported on 1 October that the adapter's check could be passed by a fake Safe that simply answered "yes, the module is enabled", and that about 114.09 ETH was lost from two Safes. Aave's founder said the attack did not touch Aave v3 itself, only a module built on top of it.

Below is what the wallets show, read by us on 14 October 2026.

The attacker's wallet, 0x42c2633438609881c8fBAb82414eb9A0c45F9353, deployed a small factory at 14:44 UTC, and the factory created the attack contract 0xF09168963ac7b31917A02Aa82fA9Cd667F4B67ff at 15:02. At 15:08 that contract borrowed 11,537 WETH from Morpho in a flash loan and used it to repay the Aave debt of the first Safe, 0xcfedf95a3653a128dfc2e4288758a1a1850d169f: 1,335.26 WETH. With the debt gone, the adapter released the Safe's collateral, 1,306.48 weETH, and the second Safe, 0xe3b23e47df7cd85876ac6cb05bdb9d7cd5b28520, gave up another 6.43 weETH.

The 1,312.9 weETH were sold in the same transaction through Curve, Fluid, Uniswap and the Paraswap router for 1,449.35 WETH. The flash loan was repaid, and what remained, 114.10 ETH, went to the attacker. The owners lost the difference between their collateral and their debt, the equity of the position.

The attacker's wallet received its first and only funding at 14:15 UTC, 53 minutes before the attack: 0.049875 ETH from Railgun's relay contract 0xAc9f360Ae85469B27aEDdEaFC579Ef2d052aD405. That is 0.05 ETH minus Railgun's 0.25% unshield fee. At 16:45 the wallet sent 114.13 ETH to a fresh address, 0x951Ad21B85C1Ce165F15d548a7C7D42520A32f1a, and one minute later that address deposited 114.03 ETH into Railgun through the same relay contract. Nothing was left on either wallet but change.

Railgun is a privacy system: from the deposit onwards, the chain no longer shows where the ether goes. We have not tried to follow it further.

At 21:03 UTC the owner of both Safes, 0x329c54289Ff5D6B7b7daE13592C6B1EDA1543eD4, sent the attacker a message in a zero-value transaction. It offered a 10% whitehat bounty: keep 11.41 ETH, return 102.69 ETH by 3 October 18:00 UTC, and the matter would be closed. By then the ether had been in Railgun for four hours and seventeen minutes. Nothing came back, and the owner's later transactions show no return.

Both drained Safes have exactly one owner, the same key 0x329c54289Ff5D6B7b7daE13592C6B1EDA1543eD4, with a threshold of one. They were set up on 17 and 18 July 2026, the days after the adapter was deployed on 16 July by 0x3Cbded22F878aFC8d39dCD744d3Fe62086B76193.

That deploying address is not a Safe owner, but it submits transactions to three other Safes, among them 0x8353D558114BCd3Fa3405BB374452BD42A780DB6, whose owners include the same key 0x329c54289Ff5D6B7b7daE13592C6B1EDA1543eD4. In other words, the people who deployed the adapter and the people who lost money through it work with the same keys. We also read every module activation on Ethereum since the adapter was deployed, 24,998 of them: only two Safes ever enabled FlashLoopAdapter, the two that were drained. The press called it "an Aave-linked exploit"; on chain it looks like a team's own tool that only the team used.

From 1 to 14 October the attacker's wallet received a long stream of fake transfers: tokens named "ETH", including copies written with look-alike letters, sent from and to addresses that start with 0x951A and end with 2f1a, like the real exit address 0x951Ad21B85C1Ce165F15d548a7C7D42520A32f1a. This is address poisoning: someone hopes the attacker will copy a look-alike address from the wallet's history and send the next payment to it. It shows that poisoning bots watch hack wallets as closely as anyone else's.

Two of the attacker's addresses, the wallet and the exit address, were already marked as hack in our database. We added the attack contract and the factory that created it. We did not mark the two Safes, their owner or the adapter's deployer: they are the victims.

To check an address yourself, use the address check.

It does not say who the attacker is, or that Aave, Morpho, Railgun, Safe or any exchange did anything wrong. The mechanics and the 114.09 ETH figure were first reported by SlowMist and Defimon Alerts. The Railgun funding and exit, the timing of the bounty offer, the single owner key and the link between the adapter's deployer and the owners are ours, read on 14 October 2026.