Enso discloses malicious liquidity pool attack, Curve pool results in approximately $225,000 in inflated quotes

According to Odaily, DeFi infrastructure company Enso revealed in its July 16 report a class of malicious liquidity pools called “toxic pools.” These pools manipulate transaction simulation to return fake optimal quotes to wallets and DEX aggregators, then change the logic when actually executing on-chain.

Enso stated that these malicious contracts can detect a read-only simulation environment and return optimized prices, but once the transaction is broadcast on-chain, they execute at worse prices or cause transaction failures. One manipulated Curve pool processed over 129,000 swaps, resulting in about $225,000 in falsely high quotes. Over 37,000 transactions were reverted, consuming nearly $30,000 in gas fees.

On Polygon, a malicious Uniswap v4 hook lured routing systems with fake exchange rates, subsequently causing a 99.1% transaction failure rate. Enso stated that it has updated its Enso Shield execution protection product to detect fake quotes in Ethereum and Polygon environments.