Skip to content

Unsupported fee-on-transfer/rebasing tokens are accepted without balance-delta accounting #289

@MaxisAlexander

Description

@MaxisAlexander

While looking through the bridge accounting flow, I noticed that fee-on-transfer and rebasing tokens are explicitly documented as unsupported in both L1StandardBridge and L2StandardBridge.

At the same time, the bridge still accepts these assets and appears to account using the requested _amount directly instead of the actual received balance.

In StandardBridge::_initiateBridgeERC20 (around lines 351–363), the bridge performs safeTransferFrom(...) and then updates accounting using _amount without checking the balance delta before/after transfer.

On the receiving side, finalizeBridgeERC20 (around lines 284–293) also appears to mint/transfer using the bridged _amount directly from the message payload.

Because of that, unsupported token mechanics can still create accounting divergence instead of failing safely. For example, with a fee-on-transfer token, the bridge may receive less than _amount while the full _amount is still represented remotely.

In practice, this could lead to under-collateralized representations of the asset on the remote chain and eventual withdrawal failures once the escrowed balance becomes insufficient.

I understand these token types are documented as unsupported already, so this may be considered an accepted limitation rather than a vulnerability. Still, I thought it was worth raising since unsupported assets are currently accepted permissionlessly rather than being explicitly rejected or normalized through balance-delta accounting.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type
    No fields configured for issues without a type.

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions