Crypto
Home›Crypto›Market Structure›Maya Protocol attacker still holds about 20.8 BTC afte…
Maya Protocol attacker still holds about 20.8 BTC after $11M exploit
The cross-chain incident left pools exposed as CACAO repricing and related arbitrage widened the damage beyond the roughly 20 BTC the founder initially flagged.
A suspected Bitcoin address tied to Maya Protocol’s Aug. 18 exploit still held about 20.8273 BTC as of Aug. 21, according to CryptoSlate analysis of public Bitcoin data, with no outgoing spend recorded. The balance was valued at about $1.59 million at the time of reporting.
CryptoSlate said the published recovery approach did not account for a larger estimated impact across Maya’s cross-chain liquidity pools. It cited technical reconstruction by SigIntZero describing six linked accounting and state-handling flaws within a single 23-message transaction, which produced a false missing-transfer signal and activated a compensation mechanism that credited CACAO to a thin ARB.LINK pool despite Maya’s reserve holding only about 168,000 CACAO.
The analyst reconstruction indicated the reserve transfer failed but an inflated balance persisted, allowing the attacker to receive roughly 99.93% of the pool’s ownership units. CryptoSlate reported the attacker then withdrew about 48.87 million CACAO and swapped into assets on other MAYAChain pools, leaving an estimated $1.36 million moved to external chains and about $291,000 remaining on MAYAChain, for total attacker-controlled value near $1.65 million to $1.7 million.
In parallel, the pool was impacted by $10.9 million, with CryptoSlate attributing about $6.4 million to CACAO repricing and about $2.9 million to arbitrage after the token fell from roughly $0.115 to $0.013, down 88.7%. CryptoSlate said Maya had not publicly defined which remaining losses it would restore or who would absorb the gap, even as its founder said he would work to fix the incident and recover in full and separately suggested replacing about 20 BTC via Aztec Chain investments if needed.
Latest closeBitcoin $77,465.59 ▲6.1%