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Story: Term Finance Hit by $8.5 Million Governance Exploit, 68% of Vault Assets Gone

By Jean-Luc Maracon

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What happened. An attacker hit Term Finance hard. About $8.5 million gone — drained through a governance exploit…

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The historical context. Governance exploits aren't new to DeFi. Not even close.

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Why it matters. Term Finance had already been through it once. Back in April 2025, an oracle error triggered…

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What to watch. A few things worth tracking closely as this plays out.

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An attacker hit Term Finance hard. About $8.5 million gone — drained through a governance exploit that gave the attacker control over the protocol's strategy vaults.

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The breach wiped out close to 68% of the assets sitting in Term's vaults. That's not a minor ding.

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What made this attack possible wasn't a bug in the base code. Term's vaults run on Yearn V3 infrastructure, which held up fine.

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The attacker apparently acquired a majority of Term's governance tokens — cheaply, it seems — and used that voting power to pass proposals that funneled the funds out.

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Back in 2022, Beanstalk Farms got hit by an attacker who used a flash loan to grab majority voting power almost instantly, then pushed through a proposal that moved $182 million…

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Term Finance's situation fits that same ugly pattern. DeFi protocols keep innovating, keep building, keep adding complexity.

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More context: SharpLink Stakes $91 Million in ETH, Becomes Second Largest Institutional Holder

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What's different here is the custom wrapper angle. Most post-mortems on governance exploits focus on flash loans or token concentration.

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No clear answer yet. Unclear whether the remediation efforts after the oracle incident touched the governance wrapper at all. Maybe they didn't.

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The broader DeFi community takes a hit every time something like this happens. Trust in decentralized systems is fragile.

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Related: Coldcard Users Urged to Replace Seed Phrases After $112 Million Bitcoin Loss

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