Keepers: DeFi’s Blind Spot
Keepers are exterior bots or providers that monitor onchain exercise and provoke transactions when predefined circumstances are met. As a result of they will occupy privileged positions inside a protocol’s execution circulate, the dangers lengthen past downtime, congestion, or compromised personal keys. The execution path itself can grow to be an assault floor.
GMX V1 Keeper Execution-Movement Exploit — $42 Million
The attacker used GMX V1’s keeper execution circulate to entry a brief window by which leverage was enabled, then re-entered the vault to create unusually massive quick positions. These positions manipulated the worldwide quick common value utilized in GMX’s AUM calculation, artificially inflated the value of GLP, and enabled roughly $42 million to be extracted via redemptions.
GMX demonstrates how keeper execution can grow to be a part of an exploit path. The keeper wasn’t compromised and didn’t execute an unauthorized transaction. The attacker exploited privileged protocol habits that turned out there whereas the keeper was legitimately executing an order.
Extra generally, keepers carry out routine actions reminiscent of auto-compounding. In lots of liquidity and yield methods, they periodically declare amassed charges or rewards and submit transactions that reinvest them into the place.
Carbon DeFi supplies native auto-compounding. Income are routinely added again to the place as trades execute, with out requiring an exterior bot to observe the place or submit a separate compounding transaction.
Automation isn’t an extra service layered on high of Carbon DeFi. It’s a part of the protocol’s underlying execution logic. Eradicating keeper-based execution eliminates one other exterior dependency and the operational dangers that include it.
