Polkadot-Based Stablecoin aUSD Depegs After Acala Network Exploit

The decentralised banking centre of Polkadot, Acala Network, has been compromised, and its stablecoin has been depegged from the dollar mark.

Acala’s Twitter page announced early this morning that configuration concerns with the Honzon protocol, which impacts its stablecoin aUSD, prompted a vote to suspend Acala’s activities while it researched the matter.

According to Coinmarket cap, the stablecoin is presently trading below $1, falling as low as $0.58 at one time. According to Acala’s website, aUSD is a decentralised, multi-collateralised stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets.

Acala tweeted that they had discovered the issue as a misconfiguration of the iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool, which went live earlier. 

We have identified the issue as a misconfiguration of the iBTC/aUSD liquidity pool (which went live earlier today) that resulted in error mints of a significant amount of aUSD
1/

— Acala (@AcalaNetwork) August 14, 2022

This led to incorrect mints of a considerable quantity of aUSD. The misconfiguration has subsequently been corrected, and the wallet addresses that received the erroneously created aUSD have been discovered; on-chain activity tracing for these addresses is currently in progress.

Looks like @AcalaNetwork was just hacked due to a bug in the iBTC/AUSD pool. Here is the attacker wallet https://t.co/eFRVeK3TiZ which now holds over a billion $AUSD.

— 0xTaysama – IYKYK (@0xTaylor_) August 14, 2022

While Acala has yet to confirm the amount involved in the hack, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao reacted to the news by stating that the attacker may have acquired “over a billion $AUD.”

At the time of publication, CoinCulture had reached out to Acala Network for comment but had not received a response.