Last night, Acala (ACA), the decentralized finance protocol based on Polkadot (DOT), was caught in what appears to be a cyberattack. Early findings indicate that hackers took advantage of a breach to steal more than $1 billion in aUSD (AUSD) tokens. This hack could be the biggest ever in cryptocurrency history. That said, the Acala blockchain was decommissioned to limit the damage.
Acala under the threat of a pirate attack?
Earlier this morning, Acala announced on Twitter the temporary suspension of its services. “We noticed a Honzon protocol configuration issue that affects aUSD. [Par conséquent,] we are taking an emergency vote to pause operations on Acala, while we investigate and mitigate the issue. We will report back as soon as we get the network back to normal.”the platform said.
In the hours that followed, the aUSD, the stablecoin issued by the Acala platform, experienced a severe drop. The token lost up to 43% of its value. Then it struggled to get back to an acceptable level of $0.98 (at the time of writing). At the same time, the trading volume on the AUSD/USD pair went from 531 miles to 214 million. This testifies to the climate of panic that reigned within the Acala community at that time.
More details
The news quickly made the rounds of the ecosystem, relayed by figures such as Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance. He provided several clarifications. In particular, he pointed out the presence of a bug in the iBTC/AUSD pool.
The team behind Acala has just confirmed with this information. According to them, the technical fault would have led to the issuance of a large number of aUSD and their distribution to random addresses. At present, the problem seems under control. The startup fixed the bug and identified the wallets concerned.
Fortunately, the tokens issued were not tradable by others, at least 99%. The rest was converted into tokens from the Acala network. It remains for the community to collectively decide on the next steps. The number of cyberattacks within the crypto ecosystem is constantly increasing, is this a security problem?
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