Harmony’s ONE Plunges 30% After Attacker Mints 4 Billion Tokens

Token Collapses After 4-Billion Token Minting Exploit

Harmony Protocol’s autochthonal token, ONE, plunged much than 30% Wednesday to scope an all-time debased pursuing an exploit that enabled an attacker to mint much than 4 cardinal tokens—representing astir 26% of the network’s full supply.

According to onchain analytics shared by crypto researcher Juiceberg, the perpetrator moved astir 97% of the fraudulently minted tokens straight to cryptocurrency exchanges, leaving astir 115 cardinal tokens sitting successful the archetypal minting addresses.

While the nonstop magnitude of tokens liquidated was unclear, the abrupt illness successful ONE’s marketplace capitalization—shrinking from astir $16 cardinal down to $11.7 million—indicates that a important information of the illicit tokens were successfully cashed out.

In the aftermath of the breach, the Harmony squad issued a bid of nationalist statements confirming the exploit and outlining exigency mitigation steps. First, the squad requested that large crypto exchanges instantly frost funds linked to 4 circumstantial superior attacker wallet addresses.

In consequent updates, the protocol said it had paused operations connected its main span interface and disclosed that it had released an urgent halfway codification patch, instructing each web validators to upgrade instantly to halt immoderate further unauthorized minting capabilities.

“All validators, delight upgrade. This spot prevents immoderate further minting. We’ll travel up with different update to code the already minted tokens,” the Harmony halfway development squad stated successful an announcement.

The squad confirmed it is evaluating further measures, including a imaginable web rollback, to neutralize the economical interaction of the fraudulently issued supply.

This latest incidental marks different stroke to a task that was erstwhile a multibillion-dollar Layer-1 ecosystem. In aboriginal 2022, ONE achieved an all-time precocious of $0.379 earlier the web suffered a $100 cardinal breach of its Horizon Bridge. In that attack, North Korea’s state-sponsored Lazarus Group allegedly exploited compromised backstage keys hosting blistery wallets tasked with listening for and processing cross-chain bridging transactions.

By the clip of the archetypal attack, ONE had already fallen to astir 2 cents. Following a multiyear structural downtrend, this latest validator-level minting vulnerability has pushed ONE down astir 97% from its peak, leaving the assemblage questioning however captious information vulnerabilities proceed to evade protocol audits and halfway infrastructure controls.

Compounding Harmony’s troubles is simply a distinct deficiency of support from high-profile Web3 information researcher ZachXBT. The researcher cited the protocol’s past of failing to reward white-hat contributors and investigators during the 2022 onslaught arsenic the crushed helium is unwilling to assist.

Replying straight to Harmony’s nationalist entreaty to exchanges, ZachXBT stated: “I volition not beryllium tracking this incidental and deliberation nary 1 should assistance them for free. Harmony took vantage of radical who assisted during the $100M Harmony Bridge exploit by DPRK successful 2022 and rewarded $0 for important freezes which led to LE [Law Enforcement] seizures, and simply said ‘good job’.”