Hacker Minted 1 Billion Tokens: That Altcoin Price Crashed!

Hacking incidents are endless in the crypto world. In a new exploit, the Holograph attacker minted 1 billion HLG tokens. These tokens were worth $14.4 million at the time of first minting. Following the hacking incident, the altcoin lost 80 percent of its value in a short time.

Holograph hacker minted 1 billion tokens in a short time!

cryptokoin.com As you follow from , high-profile hacking incidents have been increasing lately. The last of these was the Blockchain tokenization platform Holograph. A malicious actor hacked the operator agreement of the Holograph protocol. After this, the hacker minted 1 billion HLG tokens worth 14.4 million dollars. Following the hack attack, the local token of the altcoin project lost approximately 80 percent of its value.

Holograph’s X account confirmed it was hacked on June 14. He announced that he has since fixed the first exploit. He also stated that he worked with cryptocurrency exchange partners to freeze the hacker’s accounts. Holograph added that he launched his own investigation and contacted law enforcement.

Altcoin price crashed

It only took 10 minutes for HLG’s price to start falling. According to CoinGecko, in nine hours the token dropped 79.4% from $0.014 to a local low of $0.0029. Thus, HLG’s market value decreased from approximately 22 million dollars to 4.8 million dollars during this time period. HLG has since recovered slightly to $0.0075.

Price change of HLG in the last 24 hours. Source: CoinGecko

1 billion HLG tokens are worth $7.4 million at current prices. But about four hours after the first exploit, the hacker had already started converting the minted HLG into stablecoin Tether.

Processes of the hacker who minted 1 billion HLG tokens in nine processes. Source: Etherscan

How did the Holograph attack happen?

According to Etherscan, the hacker minted 1 billion HLG tokens by exploiting a smart contract vulnerability. The hacker accomplished this scale of printing in nine processes. Additionally, the first edition was published on June 13 at 12:47 CET. He sent seven of them in batches of 100 million. Matt Casto, a cryptocurrency researcher at venture capital firm CMT Digital, believes the hacker is a “rogue developer” who funded Holograph’s carrier contract address 26 days ago. Holograph has not yet commented on whether it knows the identity of the hacker.

Holograph is based on the Omnichain ecosystem and allows tokens to move across blockchains while maintaining the same contract address. Thus, it allows asset issuers to index cross-chain information. The altcoin project has received venture capital funding from companies such as Animoca Brands and Mechanism Capital.