The developers of the decentralized AI project Bittensor stopped the work of the blockchain after discovering an attack on users' wallets. One of them lost $8 million in TAO tokens.
At the time of writing, the network does not process new blocks for more than five hours, according to the explorer.
"We are investigating and, as a precaution, have recently completely stopped transactions in the chain until we have more information about the nature of this attack," one of the team members told Discord.
Onchain analyst ZachXBT suggested that there was a leak of private keys. He noted that 32,000 TAO worth $8 million were stolen from just one address.
Bittensor co—founder Ala Shaabana confirmed that the project's network has been put into safe mode - blocks are being produced, but transactions are not processed.
By way of an update, we have contained the attack and put the chain into safe mode (blocks producing but no transactions are permitted).
We’re still mid investigation and are considering all possibilities. Stay tuned.
Bittensor positions itself as a decentralized marketplace for suppliers and users of algorithms in the fields of AI and machine learning. Governance-the TAO token has a limited issue of 21 million coins, just like bitcoin.
Against the background of the incident, the asset price fell from ~$265 to ~$225 — by 15%. After a slight recovery, TAO is trading around the $238 mark.
The TAO/USDT hourly chart of the Binance exchange. Data: TradingView.By market capitalization in the AI token segment, TAO ranks sixth with ~$1.66 billion (CoinGecko).
Recall that in the second quarter, the crypto industry lost ~ $572.7 million as a result of hacker attacks and fraud during 72 incidents, Immunefi estimated.