Holograph decreased 80% in 9 hours after 1B additional HLG
Blockchain token platform Holograph's native token has plunged by 79.4% after a malicious actor breached the protocol's operator contract and minted 1 billion HLG tokens worth $14.4 million.
Holograph X's account confirmed the hack on June 14. Since then, it says it has developed the first exploit and is working with cryptocurrency exchange partners to shut down the malicious actor's accounts.
Holograph added that it has launched its own investigation and is in contact with law enforcement.
How does HLG exploitation happen?
1 billion HLG tokens were minted by the hacker in nine transactions, using a smart contract vulnerability – from the first mint on June 13 at 9:47 am UTC, according to Etherscan.
Seven of these were shipped in batches of 100 million.
It only took 10 minutes for HLG's price to start falling. In nine hours, the token fell by 79.4% from $0.014 to a low of $0.0029, HLG's market value fell from $22 million to $4.8 million during that time, according to CoinGecko. After that, HLG recovered slightly to $0.008.
The 1 billion HLG tokens are worth $7.4 million at current prices, but the hacker started converting the already mined HLG into the stablecoin Tether (USDT) four hours after the first exploit.
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Matt Casto, a cryptocurrency researcher at venture capital firm CMT Digital, believes the hacker was a “rogue dev” who funded the Holograph operator's contract address 26 days ago.
Holograph did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph asking if it knew the identity of the hacker.
Holograph is based on the Omnichain ecosystem and allows tokens to move between blockchains and index asset chain information while maintaining the same contract address.
It has received funding from venture capital firms such as Animoka Brands and Mechanism Capital.
Since the first industry hack was reported in June 2011, nearly $19 billion has been stolen, according to a Crystal Intelligence report.
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