‘Genius’ AI-crypto project LPs lose $1.3M to ‘fake token’ hack, rug pull suspected | Protos
A fake version of AI-crypto project Genius’ token, GNUS, was used to drain Uniswap liquidity providers of $1.3M on Sunday. The attack involved creating an identical token on the Fantom blockchain, where no official version of GNUS had yet been deployed. After cloning the GNUS token contract on Fantom, the attacker bridged 100M freshly minted tokens across to their Ethereum address using the Axelar bridge. Finally, the GNUS token s were sold into the existing Uniswap liquidity pool, dr AI ning the 407 ETH (worth $1.3M at the time). The Genius team acknowledged the attack via X (formerly Twitter). The CEO later pointed to a development wallet having being compromised “during a Discord hack”. This apparently “enabled [the hacker] to launch the exact address on FTM of the Axelar Token Minter Manager contract” which allowed the fake token s to be minted as genuine on Ethereum and Polygon. The sell-off caused the GNUS price to tank by over 95%, from $22.86 to $0.79, according to data...