Polymarket admits that user funds have been stolen, and "one-click login" third-party services have become a vulnerability

👤 nrvae@Claire 📅 2026-09-09 15:19:49

Polymarket reported that funds were stolen on Christmas Eve. The vulnerability originated from the third-party wallet service Magic Labs, highlighting the single point of risk behind the convenience of Web3.
(Preliminary briefing: Polymarket, the leader in the prediction market, announced that it will build its own L2. Is Polygon’s trump card gone? )
(Background supplement: How to achieve 40% annualized income through Polymarket arbitrage? )

Polymarket, the leader in the crypto prediction market, reported that funds were stolen, and many users were furious on X and Reddit in the early morning of December 24 that "the account balance was emptied."

The platform immediately admitted the security flaw in the official Discord and pointed it to a "third-party service provider." The on-chain tracking tool Lookonchain subsequently targeted wallet service provider Magic Labs, making this incident the most high-profile security breach in the crypto market in late 2025.

Officially said it has been fixed, but some people are still worried

Less than an hour after the user broke the news, Polymarket issued an announcement:

We found a vulnerability related to a third-party service provider, which has been fixed. Only a very small number of users are affected, and we will proactively contact these users.

The announcement did not disclose the amount of losses or the number of victims, but it caused greater panic. According to Polymarket’s platform’s single-month transaction volume in 2025, it is estimated that it will be billions of dollars every month. Even a “very small number” may result in high losses.

Unlike common phishing attacks, no suspicious links were circulating at the time of the incident, and many victims even enabled email 2FA. The key to bypassing the defense line is not on the user side, but on the third-party authentication in the background.

Magic Labs login mechanism has become a loophole

To lower the threshold, Polymarket introduced Magic Labs’ “Email one-click non-custodial wallet generation”. Users do not need to keep the mnemonic words and can operate Ethereum assets by sending verification codes. However, the attacker directly exploits the system vulnerability in the Magic Labs authentication layer to gain control of the wallet, and 2FA is equivalent to invalid.

The current flow on the chain shows that the hacker address split the assets in a short period of time and mixed the coins through multiple layers, making it more difficult to trace. Although the official said it "has been repaired," it has not yet responded to the community's request for a complete post-incident report.

At the same time, security company SlowMist warned GitHub of the emergence of malicious Polymarket copy robots, specifically targeting advanced players who build their own trading scripts. This program reads the local configuration file and secretly sends the private key. Although it is not directly related to the Magic Labs vulnerability, it broke out on the same day.

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nrvae@Claire

nrvae@Claire

Blockchain and cryptoassets editor, focusing onpolicyDomain content analysis and insights

Comment (10)

Coral 63days ago
Agreed, the future is the era of trusted network.
Lennon 63days ago
Can you really make money by playing chain games?
Vega 63days ago
A deflationary model may not be conducive to intraecological circulation.
David 63days ago
Looking forward to more ecological construction content.
Dylan 63days ago
The transparency advantage of blockchain has been fully demonstrated.
Finian 64days ago
How do forks happen?
Kai 64days ago
What exactly is the principle of mining?
Raymond 68days ago
What are cold wallets and hot wallets?
Tristan 82days ago
There is still a large talent gap in the industry.
Nora 83days ago
Good point, I support it.

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