The $650 million Ronin hack and subsequent Solana wallet hack continued to keep the security issues of the cryptocurrency market on the agenda. One of these events came from Acala Network on August 14. Hackers who hijacked smart contracts produced an infinite number of altcoins, pushing the price to zero.
Acala Network’s stablecoin crashes after hack
Acala Network’s stablecoin aUSD crashed on Sunday after hackers exploited a bug in a newly distributed liquidity pool to generate more than 1.28 billion tokens. The altcoin project has paused on-chain transactions, Polkadot cross-chain transactions, and oracle price data transfer to prevent stolen funds from leaving the parachain. Acala’s native stablecoin, Acala USD (aUSD) is currently trading at $0.01035. The team recently shared details of the incident on Twitter.
We have identified the issue as a misconfiguration of the iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool (which went live earlier today) that resulted in error mints of a significant amount of aUSD
1/— Acala (@AcalaNetwork) August 14, 2022
On Sunday, Polkadot’s DeFi project Acala Network was the victim of a serious hack that saw the native stablecoin aUSD drop from $1 to zero. Acala said on Twitter yesterday:
We identified the issue as a misconfiguration of the iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool (which went live earlier today), which resulted in a significant misprint of aUSD.
The hacker could not remove the altcoins and tokens he produced from the network
According to on-chain data, a hacker accidentally generated approximately $1.28 billion USD tokens. He then traded a small fraction for Acala’s native token ACA and four other tokens. Shortly after the incident, Acala put parachain into maintenance mode. It then paused swaps, cross-chain transactions, and oracle data. This left the hacker stranded on the network with about 1.27 billion worthless aUSD tokens. There are currently millions of aUSD tokens in the wallet.
The data also shows that several other users impersonated the hacker and exploited the bug for themselves. Someone who discovered the deficit printed between $80-25,000 and stole thousands of dollars from the liquidity pool. The total of the stolen funds is estimated to be less than $10 million, not taking into account the value lost in the USD’s depeg.
Hack into one of the biggest DeFi altcoin projects
Acala Network represents its own brand as a dedicated DeFi for Web3. It is built on top of the Polkadot Relay Chain. It is also an Ethereum-compatible Polkadot parachain, a modular and customizable standalone Blockchain. Its ecosystem is centered around the over-collateralized stablecoin Acala USD, inspired by MakerDAO.
In March, Acala merged with Polkadot for a $250 million fund to support USD stability. However, yesterday’s event, which saw the stablecoin drop to nearly zero, has raised concerns about the parachain’s progress in the community. Almost 24 hours after the incident, most of Acala’s network functions paused. At the same time, several updates regarding the next steps from the project have arrived. Following the news, the network’s native token, ACA, fell nearly 7% from around $0.29 to $0.26.
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