Moonwell Investigates $8.7 Million Loss on Base After MAMO Price Manipulation
Moonwell is investigating an exploit on Base that security firms and early reporting estimated at about $8.7 million, after an attacker reportedly manipulated the price of the MAMO token and used the inflated value to drain assets from the protocol’s lending markets.
We are aware of an issue affecting the MAMO Core Market on Base and are actively investigating.
As a precaution, borrow caps for all Core Markets on Base have been set to 1 wei, preventing new borrowing and limiting the potential for further impact. The supply caps for MAMO and…
— Moonwell (@MoonwellDeFi) August 27, 2026
According to an official report on X, the incident centered on Moonwell’s Base markets and appears to have involved oracle manipulation rather than a direct compromise of the protocol’s core contracts. The attacker address cited in security commentary pumped MAMO from around $0.0105 to roughly $0.088 using thin liquidity before borrowing real assets against the inflated collateral value.
How the exploit appears to have worked
Security analysis shared publicly pointed to a contract at 0xAbDA3Cfe3ce2668b7829AAccBE594Abb326BCe4F as part of the attack path. The same commentary said the attacker’s wallet, 0x719eae70d4A83f35bF82A2740699F5db84BE919D, used the inflated MAMO price to borrow from Moonwell’s mcbBTC Core Market.
Reportedly affected contracts included mcbBTC, mUSDC and mwstETH. The public security post also said the exploit drained roughly $8 million through MAMO oracle manipulation, while broader estimates placed total losses near $8.7 million.
Example transactions were linked in the security post, which described the incident as a price-manipulation attack on Moonwell’s Base lending market.
What is known so far
Moonwell had not, based on the cited reporting, released a full public breakdown of the incident at the time the reports surfaced. The available details indicate that the manipulated token had thin liquidity, which made it possible to push the price sharply higher before that value was used inside the lending mechanism.
That matters because the loss appears to have come from how the collateral was priced, not from an obvious failure of borrowing logic alone. Security firms and reporters tracking the case described it as an oracle issue tied to MAMO’s market conditions on Base.
The case adds to a long list of DeFi incidents in which illiquid collateral and fast-moving prices can create outsized lending risk when protocols rely on those prices too directly.
