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Harmony halts further minting after attacker creates 4 billion ONE
Harmony said about 97% of the minted ONE tokens have already reached exchanges, and it is preparing options to stop and freeze the funds.
Harmony confirmed it was exploited after an attacker minted about 4 billion ONE tokens without authorization, a quantity roughly equal to 26% of ONE's supply, according to Decrypt. The incident sent the token down 37% to around $0.00077, with CoinGecko price data cited in the report.
On-chain analyst Juiceberg flagged the minting early Wednesday and said the tokens were created through empty blocks. Decrypt reported that around 2.8 billion of the minted tokens were funneled to exchanges as the price fell, and that the attacker had about 115 million ONE left to sell on-chain, or around 2.9% of the total minted.
Harmony said it was working with its team and appropriate exchanges to stop and freeze the funds while preparing a patch. The company also paused its bridge, released a patch shortly after telling validators to upgrade, and said a further update would be needed to address dealing with the tokens already created.
The report said Harmony had not disclosed the vulnerability details or how many tokens reached exchanges. It also noted an unusual issue flagged by Juiceberg, that Harmony's totalSupply endpoint did not reflect the new tokens even as price trackers continue to list circulating supply at about 14.87 billion, and described how a potential rollback could erase the post-attack history including user transactions.