- Hackers used a bug in a new liquidity pool to mint 1.28 billion tokens
- aUSD lost 99% of its value
- Polkadot-based Acala launched an aUSD ecosystem fund worth $250 million
aUSD, DeFi platform Acala’s native stablecoin, lost its peg to the US dollar on Sunday. Hackers used a bug in a new liquidity pool to mint 1.28 billion tokens and aUSD lost 99% of its value.
The Acala team blocked transfers of the fraudulently minted tokens remaining on the parachain as soon as they noticed the attack, CoinDesk wrote.
There’s still 1.27b aUSD in hacker’s wallet
A wallet thought to belong to the hacker still holds around 1.27 billion aUSD. Blockchain investigators report that the hacker who minted 1.28 billion aUSD was not the only one to use the vulnerability.
A few other users are said to have stolen thousands of dollars in DOT from the liquidity pool.
aUSD is down to $0.009
Prior to the hack, aUSD was in a soft peg with the US dollar and was trading for around $1.03. After the attack, it plummeted to $0.009.
It remains unclear whether the peg can be reinstated or how Acala will deal with the fraudulent mint at all.
Jump Crypto, Pantera among investors in $250m aUSD fund
Earlier this year, Polkadot-based Acala launched an aUSD ecosystem fund worth $250 million to support startups in Polkadot’s developing DeFi ecosystem.The funds were mainly granted to create use cases for aUSD, which aimed to become DeFi’s backbone on Kusama and Polkadot.
Digital Currency Group, owner of CoinDesk, was also involved in the initiative.
Polkadot (DOT) was slightly affected by today’s news, losing just 2% of its value.
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