Elrond Native Majar DEX suffers major exploit

The Maiar Exchange, a decentralized exchange native to the Elrond Network went offline, placed under maintenance following suspicious activity, resulting in a decline in price of EGLD.

News of the suspicious activity was confirmed by the Maiar exchange, and in a Twitter thread the co-founder and CEO of the Elrond Network Beniamin Mincu revealed that his team had identified “an exploit area that we simply had to address and mitigate immediately.”

The DEX was put into maintenance mode, and Mincu announced an emergency fix was being implemented, with some Twitter users fearing the worst. One Twitter user tweeted “all transactions are suspended on maiar!!! when this will turn on, big dump is [coming], remember my words”.

Elrond’s native token lost more than 7% of its value on Sunday, with EGLD dropping from $75. Fortunately, and in spite of the price decline experienced over the past day, EGLD has recovered slightly from a low of $65.50.

However, the exploit resulted in a down time, and subsequent decline in price of EGLD, with on-chain analyst Foudres explaining how the attackers could withdraw more than 1.65 million EGLD in a Twitter thread. 

Mincu provided a fairly comprehensive update of how the team were progressing, sharing updates via his Twitter:

“Still all hands on deck with the team. Getting very close to complete recovery plan. Two swift upgrades being tested. Things looking very well. If test finalize well, pushing to share a step by step restrart plan in ~4-5 hours. Appreciate all support.”

Elrond (eGold, or EGLD) is the native coin of a blockchain that uses sharding, which spreads out crypto infrastructure into smaller pieces in order to help the network scale.

Beiamin has since released a video on Youtube that provides an overview of the last 24 hours, outlining the recovery plan, finally stating:

“You can basically assume that this type of crisis will come to all blockchains, and probably all dApps.”

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.