Enso Discloses Toxic Liquidity Pool Attacks, Manipulated Curve Pool Inflates Quotes by $225K

According to Enso, on July 16 the DeFi infrastructure company disclosed a class of malicious liquidity pools called "toxic pools" that manipulate trades to return false optimal quotes to wallets and DEX aggregators, then execute with worse pricing or fail when broadcasted on-chain. A compromised Curve pool processed over 129,000 swaps, inflating quotes by approximately $225,000, while over 37,000 transactions reverted and consumed roughly $30,000 in gas fees.

On Polygon, a malicious Uniswap v4 hook attracted routing systems with false exchange rates before triggering a 99.1% transaction failure rate. Enso has updated its execution protection product Enso Shield to detect false quotes across Ethereum and Polygon.