Crypto Market Hit by Quadrillion-Ton Token Minting Exploit

The crypto market has been hit with yet another high-profile exploit, this time affecting the MAPO token on the Map Protocol network. On Wednesday, a quadrillion tokens of MAPO were minted through an attack on the Butter Network cross-chain bridge.

The attack targeted version 3.1 of the Butter Bridge infrastructure, which is designed to connect different blockchains and allow for the transfer of tokens between them. However, the attacker was able to find a way to trick the bridge into believing that a massive mint was legitimate, resulting in the creation of an enormous quantity of MAPO tokens.

The circulating supply of MAPO before the attack sat at around 6 billion tokens. The attacker's mint exceeded this by a factor of over 100,000, effectively flooding the market with an overwhelming amount of tokens. This led to a rapid decline in price for MAPO, from approximately $0.003 to $0.0001 within hours.

The attack also had a significant impact on the token's market capitalization, which collapsed to below $1 million. This has effectively vaporized any value that holders of MAPO may have been sitting on.