Papertrade Launch-Day Price Manipulation

Summary

A trader moved Hyperliquid's ETH reference price while holding leveraged Papertrade positions, netting about $1.28 million from the platform's shared USDC pool on launch day.

Incident

• Victim: Papertrade
• Date (UTC): 2026-10-10
• Estimated loss: $1.3M
• Chain(s): Hyperliquid
• Attack type: oracle manipulation
• Funds status: stolen

Recommended actions

• Revoke token approvals granted to Papertrade contracts until the project confirms they are safe
• Integrators: pause or delist affected assets and monitor for attacker fund movements
• Beware of follow-on phishing: ignore unofficial "refund", "recovery", or "claim" links and DMs; use the project's verified channels only

Source & attribution

Full analysis on Blockchain Breaches, 0xCERT's incident archive: https://www.blockchainbreaches.com/en/breaches/papertrade-2026. Primary sources: https://financefeeds.com/papertrade-faces-bbo-price-manipulation-allegations-following-hyperevm-launch/ ; https://phemex.com/news/article/papertrade-exploited-for-128m-on-launch-day-as-1000x-leverage-model-faces-scrutiny-99518 ; https://www.kucoin.com/news/flash/papertrade-launch-exploited-for-1-28m-in-8-hours-using-1000x-leverage.