Initia Halts Network After Co-Founder Estimates $2.7 Million Exploit

Initia halted its layer-1 network and rollups Friday after co-founder Ezaan Mangalji said preliminary findings pointed to a bug that enabled unauthorized minting and the movement of about $2.7 million in assets.

The halt took effect at 11:41:30 a.m. ET (3:41:30 p.m. UTC) Oct. 23. Initia said it was coordinating with security teams, validators and exchanges to assess the incident’s scope.

Mangalji described the suspected flaw as a “Day 0” bug in MoveVM on Cosmos SDK. He estimated that about $2.7 million in AUSD, Ether (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC) was minted and bridged out before the halt.

Mangalji said the flaw did not affect Initia’s native INIT token. Agora said its own AUSD was not deployed on Initia, so the estimate does not confirm that Agora-issued tokens were involved. Initia has not announced a final loss figure or a time for restarting the network and rollups. Its investigation was still underway.