Maiar decentralized exchange goes offline after discovering security breach

Maiar Exchange, the decentralized exchange (DEX) native to the Elrond blockchain, has been temporarily taken offline after attackers exploited a vulnerability and stole approximately $113 million worth of Elrond eGold (EGLD).

A few minutes before 12:00AM UTC on Monday, Elrond co-founder and CEO Beniamin Mincu tweeted that he and his team were investigating a “series of suspicious activity” on the Maiar decentralized cryptocurrency exchange.

Shortly after, the DEX was taken offline, and Mincu reported that it had found an issue and was implementing an “emergency fix.”

About 24 hours later, around 11:00 PM UTC on Monday, Mincu tweeted that a potentially critical vulnerability had been discovered and that "exploitation of this vulnerability must be addressed and mitigated immediately".

Anonymous on-chain analyst Foudres may have spotted the suspicious activity and explained it on Twitter. He revealed that potential attackers deployed a smart contract that somehow allowed them to withdraw more than 1.65 million EGLD.

The three wallets mysteriously took out 800,000, 400,000, and 450,000 EGLDs respectively, with a total value of nearly $113 million at current prices.

The attackers sold about 800,000 EGLD worth about $54 million, which caused the price of EGLD on Maiar to plummet. The rest of the cryptocurrencies are either still held in different wallets, bridged to USD Coin (USDC) and Ether (ETH), or sold on centralized exchanges.

EGLD's price fell 9.5% from around $74 to a 24-hour low of $65.50, but has since recovered slightly and is now near $68.

Mincu said that an upgrade has been implemented to fix the vulnerability and provided a technical explanation after clarifying that the implemented solution was tested and worked.

He claimed that all funds are safe and available when the DEX restarts on Tuesday. Most of the funds that were exploited have either been fully recovered or will be paid out by the Elrond Foundation, he said.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, approximately $1.6 billion in cryptocurrencies were stolen from decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms in the first quarter of 2022, with more than 90% of the stolen cryptocurrencies coming from hacked DeFi protocols, such as Centralized exchanges.