According to a report by "The Block", the developers of the decentralized artificial intelligence project Bittensor temporarily stopped the operation of its blockchain network after discovering that user wallets were suspected of being attacked by security vulnerabilities. According to on-chain sleuth ZachXBT, the attack may be related to a leak of private keys.

Const [т, T], the administrator of the Bittensor community Discord, announced earlier on Wednesday (3rd) that the team is investigating attacks on some Bittensor wallets in the past 3 hours. For the sake of caution, the team has completely stopped transactions on the chain. Until more information is available on the nature of this attack. Bittensor’s block explorer shows that the last block was confirmed approximately 4 hours ago.

Source: Bittensor Discord

On-chain sleuth ZachXBT explained in an update on his Telegram channel that the Bittensor chain was down earlier today due to another theft incident that may have been caused by a leaked private key. According to ZachXBT, about 32,000 Bittensor native tokens TAO were stolen today, worth $8 million. This is likely to be the reason why the Bittensor Foundation decided to suspend network operations to prevent further incidents.

ZachXBT stated in early June that 28,200 TAO was stolen from a TAO holder. The attacker cross-chained the stolen funds to Ethereum and exchanged some TAO into Ethereum (ETH) and US dollars. The stablecoin USDC is then transferred to several exchanges.

As the investigation unfolds, the TAO Foundation has not issued a detailed statement on this attack. Perhaps affected by this news, the price of TAO tokens fell by nearly 13% in the past 8 hours, and TAO was trading at $230 as of press time.

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