Matcha Meta Impacted by $16.8M SwapNet Smart Contract Hack

Decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator Matcha Meta suffered a security breach on Sunday through one of its primary liquidity providers, SwapNet, in the latest cyberattack tied to exploiting smart contract vulnerabilities.

Matcha Meta disclosed the breach in a post on X on Sunday, warning that users who had disabled one-time token approvals may be at risk. The protocol urged users to immediately revoke all approvals granted to SwapNet’s router contract to prevent further losses.

Estimates of the stolen funds vary. Blockchain security company CertiK said roughly $13.3 million was taken, while PeckShield estimated at least $16.8 million in funds stolen on the Base network.

“So far, ~$16.8M worth of crypto has been drained. On Base, the attacker swapped ~10.5M USDC for ~3,655 ETH and has begun bridging funds to Ethereum,” wrote PeckShield in a Monday X post, urging users to revoke all approvals related to the protocol.

CertiK said the exploit stemmed from an “arbitrary call in @0xswapnet contract that let attacker to transfer funds approved to it.”

Matcha Meta said the exposure was linked to SwapNet rather than its own infrastructure. Cointelegraph has contacted Matcha Meta for comment on the cause of the vulnerability and any plans to compensate affected users or strengthen safeguards, but had not received a response by publication.

The incident comes two weeks after another smart contract exploit resulted in $26 million in losses from the offline computation protocol Truebit and a 99% crash for the Truebit (TRU) token, Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 8.

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Smart contracts the largest target for crypto hackers

Smart contract flaws have emerged as the leading cause of crypto losses. Smart contract vulnerabilities accounted for 30.5% of all the crypto exploits in 2025, with 56 cybersecurity incidents, according to SlowMist’s year-end report.

Account compromises and hacked X accounts accounted for 24% in second place.

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Security researchers say advances in artificial intelligence are also reshaping how vulnerabilities are identified.

In December, commercially available generative AI agents uncovered $4.6 million worth of smart contract exploits in existing protocols, through Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.

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