Saga shuts down its network temporarily after $7M cyber theft

After a DeFi project suffered a $4 million exploit earlier this week, the team behind another blockchain project, Saga, has had to deal with a $7 million exploit today.

Tonight (UTC time), the team confirmed that they had to pause the SagaEVM chain after an attacker stole around $7 million in crypto assets, including ethereum (ETH) and stablecoins such as USD coin (USDC), yUSD, and tBTC.

Saga said they’ve identified the exploiter’s wallet, and the team is now working with crypto exchanges and so-called bridges in an attempt to return the stolen funds.

According to the team’s current understanding, "the incident involved a coordinated sequence of contract deployments, cross-chain activity, and subsequent liquidity withdrawals."

However, while the investigation is still ongoing, Saga claims that the protocol’s consensus worked as intended, that there was no validator compromise, that their signer key has not been leaked, and that "the broader Saga network remains structurally sound."

The team said they’ve already implemented safeguards to prevent similar coordinated attack patterns.

The Saga protocol is designed to simplify launching dedicated blockchains, called Chainlets in the protocol’s ecosystem, which now also includes gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions, and AI agents.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, as reported by Cybernews, a DeFi protocol, Makina, was also exploited to the tune of around $4 million. In its latest incident update, the team said the sophisticated exploit involved multiple parties and lasted for approximately 11 minutes on January 20th.

"A patch addressing the issues is currently in development and will be going into a security audit later this week, and will be implemented through a protocol upgrade," the team said, detailing its recovery plan for affected users as well.

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