Initia Halts Its Layer 1 and Rollups After an Unauthorized Mint

Initia stopped producing blocks on Friday afternoon. The layer 1 and every rollup built on it went offline at 15:41 UTC, about forty minutes after someone minted tokens the network never authorized and began moving the proceeds to Ethereum. Initia called it a security incident and said it was working with validators, exchanges and outside security teams to establish how much had gone. No restart time had been set by Friday evening. Two loss figures were circulating by then, and they do not match.

Two numbers, eleven hours apart

The first came from Spreek, a pseudonymous researcher who flagged the attack at 15:27 UTC, fourteen minutes before the chain stopped. He put the amount cashed out at $2.6 million and said more was still moving. crypto.news carried that figure in a piece filed on Friday evening.

"Hacker has cashed out $2.6m thus far with more in flight," the researcher wrote.

The second came from the project. Zon, an Initia co-founder, told Unchained the attacker managed to "mint and bridge out ~$2.7m worth of AUSD, ETH, and USDC before the chain was paused." That account went out at 02:35 UTC on Saturday, roughly eleven hours after Spreek's post. Initia has confirmed no loss total on its own channels and has published no post-mortem. We could not establish which number supersedes which.

What the chain records show

The analytics firm D2 Finance walked the transactions and gave Unchained a breakdown. One transaction at 14:59 UTC minted 2 million AUSD on the Initia side. The AUSD adapter then lost 1.4 million, 71% of what it held, leaving about 576,000 behind. From the native-ETH adapter went 105 ETH, 96% of its balance. A further 1.08 million USDC arrived on Ethereum as fresh mints through Circle's CCTP, the service that burns a stablecoin on one chain and issues it on another. D2 timed the move at 7 minutes 21 seconds from the mint to $2.65 million landing on Ethereum. That is D2's reading of public records, and nobody has checked it against anything Initia has published.

Agora says its token was never on the chain

AUSD's issuer disputes the account. Agora said at 16:57 UTC that it has no smart contracts deployed on Initia, then said at 18:26 UTC that AUSD does not exist on Initia and that the stablecoin is fully backed. The Defiant, publishing in between at 17:27 UTC, reported Agora's position as an outside product using AUSD having been hit, not AUSD itself. Set against that is D2's line about 2 million AUSD minted on the Initia side. Unchained reads the minted asset as a bridged representation of AUSD, and that reading is Unchained's own; neither Agora nor Initia has endorsed it. Neither account confirms the other. Agora froze the receiving address at 16:31 UTC on a single onchain reading with no second source behind it.

Six hours dark and counting

Zon also offered a cause, describing a Day 0 bug in Initia's MoveVM running on CosmosSDK that he said did not reach native INIT tokens. He called the diagnosis preliminary, one outlet carries it, and nothing from the project confirms it. When Unchained checked at 21:52 UTC the chain had been down more than six hours with no restart date given. What individual users lost, and which applications on the network were exposed, appears in no account read here. Mints nobody authorized have been the quarter's recurring failure: Cysic suspended its bridge on 19 October after a 10 million CYS mint with no deposit behind it, and Hacken's quarterly tally put sector losses at $1.18 billion for the third quarter. Initia's own number is not in that tally yet, and until the chain restarts there is no way to fix it.