Malicious proposal seeks to drain nearly all of Ampleforth's treasury
Security & Exploits ·
A newly filed governance proposal on Ampleforth's Governor Bravo would send $2.5M in USDC to its own author under the guise of a grant, with the vote costing an attacker only about $132k to pass.
The proposal, numbered 54, was submitted by a fresh externally owned account with just two prior transactions, according to a post detailing the exploit attempt. Its sole action would transfer 2,500,000 USDC — nearly the entirety of the 2.538 million USDC held in Ampleforth's timelock — to the proposer's address. The transfer is framed as an "Observatory for SPOT completed-work grant" that was never solicited by the protocol.
The mechanics of the attack hinge on Ampleforth's low participation thresholds. The proposer has openly disclosed authorship and plans to self-vote using a delegate holding only 87,238 FORTH tokens, just above the 75,000-token minimum needed to submit a proposal. Quorum for passage sits at 600,000 FORTH, which at a token price of $0.22 amounts to roughly $132,000 — a fraction of the $2.5M prize the proposal targets if it clears the vote.
No funds have moved as of the report, and the proposal remains a live threat rather than a completed theft. The situation is described as part of a broader pattern of governance-based attacks, with a separate account flagging that Ampleforth's governance is under attack via a malicious proposal threatening the same $2.5M treasury balance, corroborating the core details of the attempted drain.
The case illustrates a structural weakness in low-cost governance systems: a token price decline can make cornering quorum cheap relative to the treasury at stake, turning routine proposal mechanisms into an attack surface. Whether Ampleforth's community will vote down proposal 54, and whether the protocol will move to raise thresholds or add safeguards against unsolicited treasury transfers, remains unresolved. It is also not yet known whether the proposer intends to accumulate additional delegated FORTH before the vote concludes.