Aztec Connect hack drains $2.1M from retired contract

An attacker exploited a deprecated smart contract belonging to Aztec Connect, a discontinued DeFi bridge, draining approximately $2.1 million in cryptocurrency. The incident occurred on June 14, 2026, and targeted a contract that had been officially retired for over three years, underscoring the persistent risks of abandoned on-chain infrastructure.

Aztec Labs, the company behind the Aztec ecosystem, confirmed it was investigating a potential exploit affecting Aztec Connect. The firm stated that roughly $2.1 million was transferred from the platform's immutable smart contract but emphasized that the current, separate Aztec Network and its users were unaffected. Aztec Connect was a privacy-focused bridge launched in 2022 and was officially deprecated in March 2023, at which point deposits were halted and development shifted to the newer Aztec Network.

The exploit leveraged a fundamental flaw in the contract's logic. According to security firm BlockSec, the attacker took advantage of a mismatch between how transactions were verified by the system and how they were settled on the Ethereum blockchain. This discrepancy allowed the creation of unbacked balances that could then be...