Maiar Exchange, a decentralized exchange (DEX) native to the Elrond blockchain, has temporarily restricted access after an attacker used an exploit and seized some $113 million worth of Elrond eGold (EGLD).
Minutes before 00:00 am UTC on Monday, the co-founder and CEO of Elrond, Benjamin Mincu, tweeted that he and his team They were “investigating a set of suspicious activities” within the Maiar platform.
Shortly after, the DEX went offline and Mincu reported that the problem had been identified and an action was being taken “emergency solution”.
In a Twitter thread published Almost 24 hours later, around 23:00 UTC on Monday, Mincu said that a potentially critical flaw had been identified that opened “a vulnerable area that we simply had to address and mitigate immediately.”
The suspicious activities have possibly been identified and explained in a Twitter thread by the pseudonymous on-chain analyst, Foudres, who revealed that the potential attacker deployed a smart contract that somehow allowed him to withdraw more than 1.65 million EGLD.
Three wallets were able to mysteriously withdraw 800,000, 400,000 and 450,000 EGLD, respectively, which at current prices is equivalent to almost $113 million total.
The attackers were able to sell around 800,000 EGLD, worth about $54 million, causing the price of EGLD on Maiar to plummet from $76 to $5. The rest of the cryptocurrency is held in various wallets, has been moved to USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH), or was sold on centralized exchanges.
EGLD price fell 9.5% from around $74 to a 24-hour low of $65.50, but has since recovered slightly and is currently trading near $68.
Mincu stated in his update that an update had been implemented to fix the bug and that a technical explanation would be given after clarifying that the implemented solutions are tested and work.
He stated that all funds are safe and will be available when the DEX becomes operational again, which is scheduled for Tuesday, saying that most of the stolen funds have been fully recovered or will be covered by the Elrond Foundation.
As we told you before, approximately $1.6 billion worth of cryptocurrencies have been stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms in the first quarter of 2022, and more than 90% of all stolen cryptocurrencies come from hacked DeFi protocols, such as decentralized exchanges.
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