Enso reveals malicious liquidity pool attack, Curve pool causes approximately $225,000 in inflated quotes
DeFi infrastructure company Enso disclosed a type of malicious liquidity pool called "toxic pools" in a report on July 16th. These pools manipulate transaction simulations to return false optimal quotes to wallets and DEX aggregators, subsequently altering the logic during actual on-chain execution.
Enso stated that the relevant malicious contracts can identify read-only simulation environments and return optimized prices, but when the transaction is broadcast on-chain, it is executed at a worse price or causes the transaction to fail. One manipulated Curve pool processed over 129,000 swaps, resulting in approximately $225,000 in inflated quotes. Additionally, over 37,000 transactions were reverted, consuming nearly $30,000 in gas fees.
On Polygon, a malicious Uniswap v4 hook attracted routing systems with fake exchange rates, subsequently triggering a 99.1% transaction failure rate. Enso stated that it has updated its execution protection product, Enso Shield, to detect fake quotes in Ethereum and Polygon environments.
