Ionic Money hack — February 2025

Ionic Money was a lending market on the Mode network, relaunched from the Midas protocol, which had itself been exploited twice in 2023. In early February 2025 attackers who had spent time posing as the Lombard Finance team persuaded Ionic to list a counterfeit LBTC token — a contract they had deployed in January 2025 and controlled — as accepted collateral. rekt.news dates the exploit 4 February; QuillAudits and the outlets reporting its monitoring date it 5 February.

Once the fake asset was live and carried a price, the attackers minted 250 of the counterfeit LBTC, deposited them and borrowed against them. QuillAudits listed MBTC, uniBTC, wrsETH, WETH and STONE among the assets drawn out; Halborn names MBTC and iBTC. The collateral was worthless, so the loans were never going to be repaid, and the lending pools' depositors carried the loss.

Published totals do not agree. Halborn put the amount borrowed against the fake collateral at $8.6 million and QuillAudits at about $8.8 million, but rekt.news put the loss at roughly $6.9 million. Around $3.5 million was bridged to Ethereum and passed through Tornado Cash, which rekt broke down as 1,204 ETH worth about $3.2 million into Tornado Cash with a further $3.7 million left sitting on Mode. Part of the damage landed outside Ionic — the borrowed tokens were swapped into MBTC and used to borrow again from Ironclad and LayerBank, and when Merlin honoured a pre-exploit snapshot for MBTC holders those two protocols were left holding the devalued token.

ZachXBT pointed out at the time that Ionic was a relaunch of the twice-exploited Midas protocol; separate coverage noted that Ionic had launched on an outdated 2022 audit inherited from Midas. Ionic never published a post-mortem. In June 2026 the team announced a permanent shutdown and told users to withdraw from all deployed chains; users reported that pools lacked the liquidity to let them do so, and some were still asking for the return of ezETH that the exploit had not touched.