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- Stabble urged users to withdraw liquidity after a former executive was identified as an alleged North Korean hacker.
- The protocol’s total value locked fell from about $1.75 million to under $663,000 after the warning.
Stabble, a decentralized exchange on Solana, told users to pull liquidity on Tuesday after a former executive was publicly identified as an alleged North Korean operative, setting off a sharp and immediate retreat from the platform.
The warning came from the protocol’s new team, which posted an emergency message urging liquidity providers to withdraw “better safe than sorry.” The alert landed roughly seven hours after onchain investigator ZachXBT identified Keisuke Watanabe, who reportedly served as Stabble’s CTO last year, as an alleged North Korean hacker.
Liquidity fled first, facts came second
That was enough to trigger a fast response from users. According to reporting and DeFiLlama-linked figures cited publicly, Stabble started the day with around $1.75 million in total value locked. After the warning, that figure fell to less than $663,000, a drop of roughly 62%.
There is, at least so far, no confirmed exploit tied directly to Stabble itself. That point matters. The panic was driven by counterparty and personnel risk, not by evidence that protocol funds had already been drained. Still, in crypto, suspicion alone can empty a pool quickly, especially when North Korean-linked actors are involved.
A personnel scare becomes a protocol stress test
The incident also lands at an awkward moment for the exchange. Public reports say Stabble was recently taken over by a new team, meaning the protocol was already in a transitional phase when the alarm hit.
That makes the episode less about one wallet or one suspicious transfer and more about trust in operating history. In decentralized markets, teams often talk about smart contract risk, oracle risk and liquidity risk. But human risk, who built the system, who touched it, who had access, still has a habit of surfacing at the worst possible time.
