An attacker has hit the Layer 1 blockchain Harmony and minted at least 4 billion of its native ONE token.

Data from CoinGecko shows the token plummeted to a new all-time low of $0.0005735 following the incident.

Hackers Mint 4 Billion ONE

X user Juiceberg was among the first to raise the alarm, posting on August 12 that an unknown person had minted 4 billion ONE tokens, which is about 26% of its supply, and moved about 2.8 billion of them into exchanges.

“The attacker has roughly 115M ONE left to sell onchain — about 2.9% of the ~4B they minted,” the on-chain analyst wrote. “(~97%) is already on exchanges and has either been sold or is sitting in deposit wallets ready to sell.”

Soon after, the protocol acknowledged the incident, although it did not disclose the root cause or confirm the amount that had been minted by the hacker. It also informed users that it was working with several exchanges in an attempt to freeze the funds. The team also said they were working on a patch to fix the issue as well as rollback options, promising to give an update as soon as they got new information.

Harmony has so far traced the theft to four wallet addresses, one1uap…43014510, one17u300a…6408efe5, one1a5hur07z…73bb08eb, and one1h56hkx…58ff1a70ba, and has asked all exchanges to “block and freeze” any funds that track back to them. Due to the incident, the team has also paused the LayerZero-Harmony bridge and asked validators to upgrade with a patch that prevents any further minting of ONE.

“We’ll follow up with another update to address already minted tokens,” the team promised.

This is not the first time Harmony has been attacked, as it lost about $100 million in 2022, when its Horizon Bridge was exploited.

ONE Dumps to All-Time Low

Following the incident, the ONE token, which had been trading around $0.00117, dropped suddenly to about $0.00057 to register a new all-time low. At the time of writing, the token had shaken off some of the shock and was changing hands 33% above that ATL, although the new level still represented a nearly 40% loss in 24 hours. Over seven days, the asset is 32% in the red per CoinGecko data and more than 28% on the monthly chart.

The attack happened right after another one that hit the XRPL-Coreum bridge, with nearly 200,000 XRP stolen in that incident where the hacker tricked the bridge’s deposit-checking system into treating a wallet-to-wallet transfer as an actual deposit.

Source: CryptoPotato