The native token of the Map Protocol ecosystem (MAPO) suffered a devastating crash, losing 96% of its value in just a few hours. The financial disaster was triggered by a critical vulnerability in the Butter Network cross-chain bridge, which was skillfully exploited by an unknown attacker.
A Quadrillion Out of Thin Air: Mechanics of the Hack
Technical analysis of the incident revealed that the project’s private keys were not compromised—the issue lay in the code itself. The flaw was found in the message validation logic of the Solidity smart contract.
- What was the flaw? The hacker sent a forged transaction replay request.
- The Result: The system recognized the fake request as valid. This allowed the attacker to freely mint one quadrillion new MAPO tokens. This astronomical volume exceeded the actual market supply by tens of thousands of times, instantly rendering the coin worthless.
Market Panic and the Hacker’s Loot
The market reacted to the massive issuance instantly. At the peak of the crash, the price of MAPO plummeted to a critical $0.00009. Later, the quotes managed a partial recovery, bouncing back to the $0.002 level.
Blockaid Analysts’ Data:
The hacker managed to swiftly liquidate about 1 billion MAPO through liquidity pools on the Uniswap decentralized exchange. Their net profit amounted to 52 ETH (approximately $110,000).
However, the main threat is not yet over: nearly one trillion tokens still remain in the hacker’s wallet, posing a continuous risk to liquidity on other trading platforms.
Rescue Plan: Migration and Nullification
The Map Protocol developers, alongside Butter Network, quickly went into crisis management mode and took the following steps:
- Network Freeze: The Map Protocol mainnet was temporarily halted to prevent further manipulation.
- Migration: The team is already preparing a transition to a new, secure smart contract.
- Snapshot: The developers promised to take a snapshot of the network to fairly distribute new assets to affected users.
- Punishing the Attacker: All MAPO tokens held in the hacker’s addresses will be completely nullified.
Meanwhile, Butter Network representatives rushed to reassure the community, stating that user funds were not directly affected during the attack and remain secure.
A Dark Spring Trend for the Crypto Industry
The Map Protocol project positions itself as a crucial interoperability layer for asset exchange between Bitcoin and major networks (Ethereum, BNB Chain, TRON, and Solana). However, this incident only underscores the general vulnerability of modern cross-chain solutions.
This spring is breaking cybersecurity anti-records. This past April became the most devastating month of the year, with the industry losing $651 million across more than 20 major hacks. May continues this bleak streak—aside from Map Protocol, projects like Ekubo, TrustedVolumes, THORChain, Verus, and Echo have also fallen victim to hacker attacks recently.
