Criminal prints millions in Resolv stablecoin, crashes its price 70%
A hacker minted roughly $80 million worth of the Resolv stablecoin out of thin air, triggering a 70% price collapse and walking away with an estimated $25 million in profit.
A representative crypto token with a US dollar logo. Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A hacker minted roughly $80 million worth of the Resolv stablecoin out of thin air, triggering a 70% price collapse and walking away with an estimated $25 million in profit.
The team behind the Resolv USR stablecoin confirmed today that this past weekend, "a malicious actor" created around $80 million in the token that wasn't backed by anything. While the post-mortem is still in progress, the team added that the criminal compromised their private key and then accessed the stablecoin's infrastructure.
The uncollateralized tokens were exchanged for other stablecoins, such as tether (USDT) and USD coin (USDC), before eventually converting them into ethereum (ETH), now sitting in a wallet worth around $23.4 million at the time of writing. Meanwhile, a further million USD worth of tokens sit in a separate wallet.
As the attacker was dumping USR, its price depegged from the usual level of around $1 and is now trading near $0.30.
Today, Resolv said that during the attack, the underlying collateral "was not directly compromised" and the protocol holds approximately $141 million in assets. According to the Resolv, the only realized impact identified to date is $0.5 million in redemptions processed prior to the pause of relevant smart contracts. Also, the team managed to destroy 9 million USR tokens held by the attacker.
"As an initial step in the recovery process, we are preparing to enable redemptions for all pre-incident USR, beginning with allowlisted users," the team said, adding that it plans to enable redemptions today. It is urging everyone not to trade USR or related Resolv tokens while recovery measures are being implemented.
Meanwhile, various decentralized finance protocols, such as Aave and Inverse Finance, report that they haven't suffered losses from this attack, unlike in the heavily intertwined crypto space.
"Given the size of the mint and USR’s market cap, this is not a Terra Luna-type event," Charles Guillemet, CTO of crypto wallet manufacturer Ledger, concluded, referring to the crash of Terra/Luna tokens in 2022, which resulted in a broader market crash.
Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.