The price of decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Acala’s stablecoin crashed 99% after hackers minted and then stole 1.28 billion digital tokens.
Acala developers said online hackers exploited a bug in the platform’s liquidity pool to mint more than a billion stablecoin tokens.
A liquidity pool is a digital pile of cryptocurrencies locked in a smart contract, which results in creating liquidity for faster transactions on decentralized exchanges and DeFi platforms.
After detecting the cyberattack, Acala temporarily disabled its platform but not before the damage was done to the price of its stablecoin.
Market observers have pointed out that the hackers who minted 1.28 billion stablecoins were not the only ones to take advantage of the bug, with several other users stealing thousands of dollars worth of the stablecoin from the liquidity pool.
Launched earlier this year, Acala’s stablecoin, called “aUSD,” was pegged to the U.S. dollar until the hack occurred. After the attack, the price of the stablecoin plunged from $1.03 U.S. per token to $0.009 U.S.
Acala said that it is tracing the on-chain activity to resolve the situation with aUSD and try to restore the dollar peg.
Multiple cryptocurrency platforms have lost money or been disrupted by cyberattacks this year.
