Zentra Finance ctUSD Aave-Fork Exploit
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anchored·5Ru1qN…pKM6Summary
Zentra Finance is a decentralized money market protocol deployed on Citrea, a Bitcoin ZK rollup, built as a fork of Aave V3 Core. On September 9, 2026, an attacker exploited a boundary condition in Zentra's custom aToken burn logic to drain approximately $143,000 in ctUSD without burning any collateral tokens. As of the date of this investigation, Zentra's lending markets remain suspended, no confirmed fund recovery has been reported, and the September 14 white-hat deadline passed without a publicly confirmed response from the attacker.
Connected Entities
1 entityNo connected entities recorded yet — this investigation is not currently linked to any other page in the index.
Timeline(5 events)
9 September 2026
Exploit occurs at 12:59:37 UTC. Attacker uses flash loan and boundary condition in aToken burn logic to drain approximately 140,000 ctUSD and ~10 USDC.e from Zentra Finance's ctUSD reserve on Citrea (block 12,428,145; tx 0x9ac5df7e...074aa1). Estimated total losses: ~$143,000.
DeFiHackLabs PR #1265; CryptoTimes9 September 2026
Zentra Finance suspends all lending markets. Citrea suspends cross-chain services as a precautionary measure pending investigation.
CryptoTimes; Phemex News10 September 2026
Citrea restores cross-chain services for ctUSD, USDC, USDT, WBTC, and CTR after confirming the root cause was isolated to Zentra's contracts. Citrea confirms its core protocol and bridge contracts were unaffected. Some solver-based routes continue to be gradually resumed.
Phemex News; PANews; KuCoin11 September 2026
Zentra Finance publishes post-mortem, traces stolen funds to a specific wallet, publishes recovery address (0x0A66f2D0c603A6E9C23b64Ea29525B7E6F5609B8), and opens Blockscan Chat communication. Protocol offers bounty and immunity from legal action in exchange for fund return.
Crypto Economy; CryptoTimes14 September 2026
White-hat deadline of 12:00 UTC passes. Zentra Finance had stated it would pursue on-chain forensic tracking, technical coordination, and legal action if the attacker did not respond. No public confirmation of a response from the attacker has appeared in available sources as of September 22, 2026.
CryptoTimes; Crypto EconomyDecision Log
- hash: 9gaSauRxzgkhFqEueA1GTwGL5B3yrujMsqa7svYn4kpi
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain (1 event). 9 of 10 cited source URLs have an Internet Archive snapshot.
model: claude-sonnet-4-6
generated: 9/22/2026, 5:09:26 PM
last updated: 9/22/2026, 11:25:24 PM
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