Initia Exploit Sends AUSD, USDC and Ether to Ethereum in 7 Minutes, 21 Seconds

Assets reached Ethereum within seven minutes and 21 seconds of an Initia mint, adding detail to the exploit that halted Initia's layer 1 and rollups Friday, Oct. 23.

A 10:59 a.m. ET transaction created two million tokens labeled AUSD on Initia. After those tokens were burned, separate LayerZero adapters on Ethereum released 1.4 million AUSD, or 71% of the AUSD adapter's balance, and 105 Ether (ETH), or 96% of the native-ETH adapter's balance. The adapters hold assets backing bridged tokens.

Another 1.08 million USD Coin (USDC) arrived through Circle's CCTP.

Agora, which issues AUSD, said the stablecoin is fully backed and that it has no smart contracts deployed on Initia. The AUSD payout came from an Ethereum adapter holding assets behind Initia's bridged version of the token. These transaction details build on earlier coverage of Agora's account and the adapter transfer.

Initia co-founder Zon said preliminary findings point to a bug in Initia's MoveVM on CosmosSDK that allowed additional tokens to be created on the layer 1. Zon said the bug did not affect native INIT and estimated about $2.7 million in assets left before the network was paused. Initia had not confirmed a final loss figure.

Initia had no announced restart date as of 5:52 p.m. ET Friday, Oct. 23, and its investigation remained underway.