The leading decentralized exchange (DEX) Maiar which is deployed on Elrond network apparently faces an exploit leading to a 7% price drop in Elrond’s native token $EGLD.
Maiar has since then been placed under maintenance. Its native token MEX is still unable to recover from a significant price drop that saw it lose 90% of its value yesterday.
Beniamin Mincu, the founder and CEO of Elrond, tweeted that the team is investigating a set of suspicious activities on the Maiar DEX, and will update the community after analyzing the situation.
Twitter user foudres.eth later posted a detailed Twitter thread explaining the background of the events that unfolded in the past 24 hours.
He discovered three wallets that had sold a considerable number of EGLD tokens. The wallets were created at the same moment and received funds from Binance, after which they allegedly used the deploy mechanism to execute a smart contract.
After the smart contract deployment, the wallet users called the ‘Withdraw’ method and received over 1600k EGLD tokens whose origin is not yet known.
All the 3 wallets received 800k, 400k, and 450k $EGLD respectively and began to dump them. It was 200k USDC by 200k USDC, then unwrapped them to have USDC on ETH chain, and then bridged them.
They started to dump them at 10:08 PM as a test, and later $EGLD lost 92% of its value in about 38 min, after which the Maiar network was put under maintenance.
They sold 951 of EGLD tokens and succeeded to bridge 5M to 6M of USDC before the maintenance. 88k of EGLD was sent to one account and later the account sent 38k EGLD to Binance.
So out of the 1650M EGLD, 5-6M USDC and 38k EGLD are already gone. The remaining 10M USDC, 170k UTK and 180k EGLD are still on the 4 wallets.
All USDC received by the 3 wallets were sent to this smart contract, and it seems that they swapped USDC for ETH on Uniswap V3.
foudres.eth found another suspicious wallet whose address is an arbitrage bot between DEX and CEX.
This account received 700k USDC and purchased EGLD at 57$ for the first time and then at ~$5. In a transaction, this wallet purchased 1000 EGLD tokens for a price of $5433.
So in total the bot bought 98200 $EGLD at the average price of $5741. Then the bot sent 70k $EGLD on Binance and Kucoin wallet, and the remaining 30k is still on this wallet.
Apparently no user funds were compromised until now as the Elrond team took the necessary steps while monitoring the suspicious activities. The community praised the team for a timely response.
CEO Mincu later tweeted “Identified the potential issue, and working on an emergency fix. Will update again once fix is deployed. ”
Currently the EGLD token is trading at $71.94, and the MEX token is trading at $0.00003735 at the time of writing.
Also Read: DEX Volume Surge Amid SEC Crackdown!
