Blockchain infrastructure firm Enso has published research detailing a new category of malicious liquidity pools, dubbed "toxic pools," that can manipulate transaction simulations to present attractive quotes while delivering worse on-chain execution. The company argues this reveals a broader weakness in decentralized finance infrastructure rather than a vulnerability in a single protocol. As wallets, DEX aggregators and routing engines increasingly rely on transaction simulations to determine optimal execution paths, toxic pools exploit that dependency by altering behavior after a transaction is included in a block. Enso’s two-month forensic analysis, combining archive-node RPC data, transaction tracing, and smart contract inspection, identified two active toxic pools: a manipulated Curve liquidity pool on Ethereum that processed over 129,000 swaps with approximately $225,000 in overstated quotes and $30,000 in wasted gas from 37,000 failed transactions, and a malicious Uniswap v4 hook on Polygon with a 99.1% transaction failure rate. The research also discovered that the Ethereum-based pool alternated between honest and manipulated execution, making periodic inspection insufficient. Enso co-founder Milos Costantini stated, "The industry has spent years optimizing price discovery. Our findings suggest the next challenge is verifying execution integrity." In response, Enso expanded its execution-protection layer, Enso Shield, with toxic-pool detection and live execution verification tools.
In a separate study, on-chain analytics platform Dune, commissioned by 1inch, found that about 85% of concentrated liquidity across major DEXs—Uniswap v3, Uniswap v4, PancakeSwap v3, and Aerodrome Slipstream—is underutilized, representing roughly $1.6 billion in idle capital weekly. The study analyzed roughly the top 200 pools by activity across seven chains over 26 weekly snapshots between January and June 2026. It found 29.5% of tracked capital out of range, 56.9% in range but never touched by trades, and only 13.7% actively used. Forgone fee earnings from this idle capital are estimated at $150 million annually, with $116 million on Uniswap, $25 million on PancakeSwap, and $6–12 million on Aerodrome. The research also revealed that 36.7% of idle money had not been adjusted in over 90 days, and individuals hold the bulk of idle capital. Dune research lead Filippo Armani noted that DEXs have grown significantly despite much of their liquidity not fully at work. 1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz commented that liquidity providers are leaving billions of dollars and millions in fees on the table, and announced that 1inch is preparing to launch Aqua, a shared liquidity product targeting this inefficiency.
