Unnamed trading Safe on Avalanche (approval squat) hack — October 2026

A 2-of-7 Safe multisig on Avalanche that held a trading operation’s inventory had, on 7 March 2026, granted unlimited WAVAX, USDC, WETH.e and BTC.b allowances to an address where the same team’s pool contract lives on Base, Arbitrum and Ethereum. On Avalanche that address was empty. According to Defimon, it is simply what Safe’s public CreateCall contract produces on its 13th deployment, so anyone could place code there and spend the allowances. The owner has not been publicly named.

On 26 October 2026 a fresh account deployed CreateCall, ran twelve throwaway deployments and placed a sweeper at that address. An MEV bot copied the transaction and front-ran it in the same block at 12:56:14 UTC, and the original attempt reverted. This registry read the bot’s transaction: the Safe lost 3,090,123.58 USDC, 350,375.86 WAVAX, 181.98 WETH.e and 10.79 BTC.b. Security firms valued that at $7.45 million; at CoinGecko’s prices for the day it is about $7.50 million. The same operator’s signers emptied its Safes on other chains into a fresh address that afternoon.

The bot said it was acting as a whitehat. After on-chain messages with the owners, who offered a bounty of more than 5%, it returned every asset on 27 October except 42,541 WAVAX, which we confirmed from the return transfers: the 42,500 WAVAX bounty (about $371,000) the bot was offered, plus a small difference. The $7.07 million counted as recovered is the headline less that WAVAX at the day’s price.