Hacker minted one billion tokens: The price crashed!
HLG, the native token of blockchain platform Holograph, fell 79.4 percent after a hacker hacked the protocol's operator agreement and minted 1 billion tokens.
Holograph's X account confirmed the cyberattack on June 14. The account has since revealed that it has fixed the initial attack and that the hacker worked with cryptocurrency exchange partners to freeze their account. Holograph added that it launched its own investigation and contacted law enforcement.
According to Etherscan, 1 billion HLG tokens were minted in nine transactions by the hacker exploiting the smart contract vulnerability; The first printing took place on June 13 at 12:47. Seven of these were sent in the form of 100 million tokens.
It only took 10 minutes for HLG's price to start falling. In nine hours, the token dropped 79.4 percent from $0.014 to $0.0029. According to CoinGecko, HLG's market cap dropped from approximately $22 million to $4.8 million during this time period. HLG has since recovered slightly to $0.008.
At current prices, 1 billion HLG tokens are worth $7.4 million, but the hacker had already started converting the minted HLG into Tether.
Matt Casto , cryptocurrency researcher at venture capital firm CMT Digital, believes the hacker is a malicious developer who funded Holograph's operator agreement address 26 days ago.