ZetaChain'in 87 dolar değerinde bir hırsızlığa uğradığı bildirildi. Milyonlarca dolar değil.

Crypto has had plenty of bad days this year, but this one comes with a punchline. According to a post by Kreig_DK on X, ZetaChain was hacked "yesterday" and the total damage came to $87. KuCoin's news feed mirrored it on October 23 under the label "meme of the day."

Eighty-seven dollars. A bad swap fee on a quiet afternoon would do more harm.

Now the boring part. As of October 24 I can't confirm any of it. I found no statement from ZetaChain, no alert from PeckShield or CertiK, and no transaction hash attached to the post. Right now this is a claim with a funny number on it, not a verified incident.

The April Hack Was No Joke

ZetaChain's real exploit happened in April, and nobody laughed. On April 27 the team announced on X that its GatewayEVM contract had been attacked, that only internal team wallets were hit, and that cross-chain transactions were paused. SlowMist traced the root cause to the call function in GatewayZEVM, which had no access control and no input validation. Yes, the contract names differ between the two statements.

Early loss estimates were all over the place. The Block cited DefiLlama at $300,000, while Cryptopolitan said the hack took under $10,000. The post-mortem landed on $333,868 across nine transactions on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and BNB Smart Chain, all pulled from three team wallets. Outlets even disagree on the date: The Block says April 24, crypto.news says Sunday, which would be April 26.

The attacker did their homework. The wallet was funded through Tornado Cash three days earlier, a custom drainer contract was deployed, and an address poisoning campaign ran before the drain, crypto.news reported. The drain also leaned on unlimited token approvals that nobody had revoked. And the vulnerability class had already reached ZetaChain through its bug bounty, where the initial reports were dismissed as intended behavior.

That last detail is the one I can't shrug off. Losing $334K from team wallets is an expensive lesson. Being told about the hole in advance and filing it under "by design" is a different kind of embarrassing.

April's loss was roughly 3,800 times bigger than $87.

A Chain On Its Way Out

For anyone who stopped paying attention: ZetaChain launched in 2021 as an interoperability layer 1, pitching one chain that could talk to Bitcoin, Ethereum and everything else. It raised $27 million in 2023 from backers including Blockchain.com, Jane Street Capital, Human Capital and Sky9 Capital, according to Cointelegraph

That pitch is mostly gone.. TokenRadar's summary says ZetaChain announced on June 1 that it would wind down its cross-chain features to focus on Anuma, a private AI app. On September 20, holders passed Proposal 68 with 99.4% support on 58% turnout, against a 40% quorum. The plan: move ZETA to Solana as an SPL token at 1:1 and eventually shut down the L1. The project says Anuma has passed 300,000 users, per CryptoRank's coverage.

The vote didn't shut anything down. A second proposal still has to set the snapshot, the withdrawal window and the halt date, so the L1 is still running. ZETA sat around $0.0407 on KuCoin's page, down about 1.7% on the day. In late April it traded near $0.054, per Cryptopolitan.

ZetaChain isn't the only one packing up. BounceBit retired its standalone chain in August after an authorization flaw cost it about $3 million in BB tokens. Harmony proposed shutting down its own layer 1 on September 6, weeks after an exploit minted unauthorized ONE tokens, Cointelegraph reported.

So What Was The $87?

I don't know, and as far as I can tell nobody has said publicly. Here's my guess, and it is only a guess: leftover token approvals. After April, ZetaChain told anyone who had used the gateway contracts to revoke their ERC-20 permissions, and Blockaid had pushed the same advice on April 27, pointing people to Revoke.cash. Some people surely never did. A drainer sweeping stale approvals from a dying chain's old users would plausibly net dollars, not dollars with commas.

The other options are less interesting: a tiny test transaction, or a tracker labeling dust as a hack. Pick your favorite.

For scale, PeckShield counted 55 major incidents and about $766.5 million stolen in September, the worst month of 2026 so far. CertiK counted 97 incidents and $768.4 million, and its 2026 total sits at $2.68 billion across 656 incidents, per Bitbase. Neither dashboard will notice $87.

If you ever approved ZetaChain's gateway contracts, go to Revoke.cash and clear them out. It takes a minute and usually costs less than the $87 we've all been laughing about.