anthias labs
Anthias Labs is a small on-chain advisory firm, founded in 2022, focused on DeFi risk management and system design. Since May 2025 it has been a risk partner for Moonwell's markets on Base, paid $25,000 a month, and it curates the Moonwell Ecosystem USDC vault on Morpho. Both 2026 incidents on Moonwell Base, cbETH in February and MAMO in August, happened under its mandate.
Our read
Anthias writes fast, detailed post-mortems and its monitoring reacts in minutes. The record on Moonwell Base is still poor: two losses in six months totalling about $11.8 million, neither with a confirmed payout, and the second came from listing a thin-liquidity token at a 50% collateral factor. Moonwell Base users should read its 28-day recommendations before trusting the caps.
Key facts
- Moonwell mandate
- Risk partner for Moonwell's Base markets, $25,000/month, parameter review every 28 days
- May 2025 · Moonwell Forum ↗
- Morpho vault
- Curator of the Moonwell Ecosystem USDC vault since October 2025
- Sep 2026 · Morpho Forum ↗
- Losses on its mandates
- ~$2.68M (cbETH, Feb 2026) and ~$9.13M residual debt (MAMO, Aug 2026)
- Sep 2026 · Moonwell Forum ↗
What Anthias Labs does
Anthias Labs calls itself a boutique on-chain advisory firm. Before taking on live mandates it did research and tooling: it maintains the open-source Arbiter (a Rust EVM sandbox for simulations), Arena (an LP simulation platform) and Flare (a Solana CLI built with Solana Foundation support), and lists Arbitrum, Optimism, the Uniswap Foundation, Compound, Euler and Aave among past partners.
| Mandate | Role | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Moonwell (Base) | Risk partner: collateral factors, caps, rate curves, reserve checks every 28 days; new listings reviewed within 48 hours | May 2025 |
| Felix Protocol (Hyperliquid) | Manager of Morpho-based vaults in USDC, USDT, USDH, USDHL and HYPE | May 2025 |
| Morpho | Curator, Moonwell Ecosystem USDC vault (lends against WELL, stkWELL, MAMO) | October 2025 |
Moonwell pays it $25,000 a month. It joined as a second risk manager on Base next to Gauntlet, filling the slot left when Warden Finance merged into Morpho. No document sets out its general parameter method; the reasoning is in its monthly recommendations.
Its first vault work was for Felix Protocol on Hyperliquid, starting May 2025: eight Morpho-based vaults in USDC, USDT, USDH, USDHL and HYPE that reached about $200 million in deposits within six months. Anthias says none of them had depositor losses through the 10 October 2025 crash. That claim is its own; we have not seen an independent check.
'Anthias' searches are mostly about the reef fish and the Anthias digital-signage software. Neither is related to this firm.
The Moonwell cbETH and MAMO incidents
| cbETH, 15 Feb 2026 | MAMO, 27 Aug 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Cause | Governance proposal MIP-X43 set an oracle that read only the cbETH/ETH ratio, not the ETH/USD price | mMAMO exchange rate inflated by direct transfers; MAMO price pushed up through thin liquidity |
| Anthias response | Flagged at 18:05 UTC, four minutes after execution; caps cut to 0.01 | Liquidations started 32 seconds after the last borrow |
| Loss | ~$2.68M to ~181 borrowers; $1.78M protocol bad debt | ~$9.13M residual debt after ~$11.03M borrowed |
| Post-mortem | 17 Feb 2026 | 28 Aug 2026 |
The cbETH error was not Anthias' parameter, but the fix was slow: its caps stopped new borrowing, while the bad oracle stayed live through Moonwell's five-day governance cycle. MAMO is squarely a risk-manager question. MAMO, a Moonwell ecosystem token with thin liquidity, carried a 50% collateral factor in a market whose parameters Anthias was paid to set, and its own Morpho vault accepted it as collateral. Neither recovery plan had confirmed payouts when we checked. The cbETH plan mixes a partial treasury repayment with a 12-month share of future protocol revenue; the MAMO plan was put to governance on 4 September 2026.
Incident log
2 entries · $11.8M lost in total · repaid, confirmed: 0 of 2 where user funds were at stake
Exploit$9.1M
MAMO market manipulation on Moonwell Base
An actor inflated the mMAMO exchange rate by transferring MAMO straight into the contract, pushed MAMO's price up through thin liquidity and borrowed about $11.03M. About $9.131M of borrower obligations remained after liquidation, Anthias' estimate of residual and potential bad debt.
Repayment unknownA recovery plan for the affected Base USDC market was put to governance on 4 September 2026; no payout confirmed.Other$2.7M
cbETH oracle misconfiguration on Moonwell Base
Governance proposal MIP-X43 executed with an oracle reading only the cbETH/ETH ratio, mispricing cbETH. Anthias' monitoring caught it four minutes later and cut caps, but liquidations continued until governance could fix the oracle. About $2.68M of net losses across roughly 181 borrowers; $1,779,044.83 of protocol bad debt.
Repayment unknownMoonwell's recovery plan combined a partial treasury repayment with a share of future protocol revenue, claimable over 12 months. We found no confirmation of payouts, and remediation questions were still open on the forum in August 2026.
In our ratings
This page is the record. The scores sit on the review cards, next to the evidence and the weights they came from.
Compare Anthias Labs with
Block AnaliticaDeFi risk manager · 2019 · SingaporeBlock Analitica (BA Labs) is a Singapore DeFi risk firm, Sky's risk team since 2019, and was risk curator of Summer.fi's Lazy Summer vaults until 2026.
GauntletDeFi risk manager · 2018 · United StatesGauntlet is a New York DeFi risk firm that sets Compound's lending parameters and curates yield vaults on Morpho, Kamino and Drift. Founded in 2018.
Steakhouse FinancialDeFi risk manager · SwitzerlandSteakhouse Financial curates USDC lending vaults on Morpho, including the ones behind Coinbase's in-app USDC lending, and grew out of MakerDAO's RWA work.
LlamaRiskDeFi risk manager · 2021LlamaRisk is a DeFi risk firm that began in 2021 serving Curve DAO and has run Aave's risk parameters since Chaos Labs left in April 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What does Anthias Labs do for Moonwell?+
It recommends collateral factors, supply and borrow caps and interest-rate curves for Moonwell's Base markets every 28 days, reviews new listings, and posts incident reports.
Did Anthias Labs cause the Moonwell cbETH incident?+
The faulty oracle came in through a governance proposal, not an Anthias parameter. Anthias caught it within four minutes and cut caps, but could not replace the oracle before the governance delay ran out.
Is the Anthias Labs vault on Morpho safe?+
The Moonwell Ecosystem USDC vault lends against Moonwell tokens (WELL, stkWELL, MAMO), which are thinly traded next to ETH or BTC. MAMO's manipulation in August 2026 shows the risk.
How is Anthias Labs paid?+
Moonwell's DAO pays it $25,000 a month for the Base risk mandate, as set in its May 2025 proposal.
What changed
- Profile published.
Compiled by
Blockchain Security Researcher · September 27, 2026
We have no commercial relationship with Anthias Labs and earn nothing from any link on this page. Every fact above carries the date it was true and a link to where it comes from; if one is out of date, the contact page reaches the editor who keeps this file.