Enso says toxic liquidity pools produced about $225,000 in inflated quotes through a manipulated Curve pool

DeFi infrastructure firm Enso said in a July 16 report that it identified a class of malicious liquidity pools it calls “toxic pools.” According to the company, these contracts manipulate trade simulations by showing wallets and DEX aggregators false best quotes, then switch behavior when the transaction is actually sent on-chain. Enso said the contracts can detect a read-only simulation environment and return an optimized price during that stage, only to execute at a worse rate or cause the trade to fail once broadcast. The report said one manipulated Curve pool processed more than 129,000 swaps and resulted in about $225,000 in inflated quotes. It also said more than 37,000 transactions were reverted, consuming nearly $30,000 in gas fees. On Polygon, Enso said a malicious Uniswap v4 hook used fake exchange rates to attract routing systems and then produced a 99.1% transaction failure rate. The company added that it has updated Enso Shield, its execution protection product, to detect false quotes on Ethereum and Polygon.