In brief
- Harmony confirmed an exploit after an analyst reported that an attacker minted about 4 billion ONE, roughly 26% of the supply.
- Around 97% of those tokens have already reached exchanges, on-chain analyst Juiceberg said.
- ONE was trading at about $0.00077, down 37% on the day, after Harmony shipped a patch to stop further minting.
Layer-1 blockchain Harmony has confirmed it was exploited after an attacker minted roughly 4 billion ONE tokens without authorisation, sending the token down 37% to about $0.00077, per CoinGecko data.
On-chain analyst Juiceberg flagged the mint early Wednesday, putting it at close to 4 billion tokens, or about 26% of the supply, and saying the tokens had been created through empty blocks. Around 2.8 billion were funnelled onto exchanges as the price fell.
In a follow-up tweet, the analyst said the attacker had roughly 115 million ONE left to sell on-chain, about 2.9% of the total minted. "The overwhelming majority (~97%) is already on exchanges," Juiceberg wrote, and had either been sold or was sitting in deposit wallets.
Harmony responded in a tweet that it was "working with our team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds," adding that it was preparing a patch and weighing rollback options. In a second post it named four wallets, each listed in both Harmony and hex formats, and asked exchanges to block anything traced to them.
Just over two hours after that first statement it paused its bridge, then released a patch a minute later, telling validators to upgrade to a build it said prevents any further minting. Dealing with the tokens already created would take another update, it said. Five hours had passed since Juiceberg's first post.
