WEMIX Hit by Smart-Contract Ownership Attack, $724,000 in Crypto Stolen

Layer-1 blockchain WEMIX said a smart-contract ownership attack led to the theft of about $724,000 in cryptocurrency.

Cointelegraph reported on July 26 that WEMIX disclosed an attack at 9:17 a.m. UTC in which ownership of a contract tied to its stablecoin WEMIX$ was seized. The attacker minted about 5.23 million WEMIX$ without authorization, then swapped the tokens for 30,736 WEMIX and about 724,198 USDC.e.

The stolen USDC.e was bridged to Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain. It was then exchanged for other assets, including Ether and Tether, and dispersed across multiple wallet addresses. WEMIX said some of the funds were deposited at centralized exchanges and that it had asked the exchanges and stablecoin issuers to freeze the assets and cooperate. Some exchanges have already frozen the related addresses.

In response, WEMIX temporarily suspended all bridges connected to its Layer-1 network WEMIX 3.0, including Chainlink CCIP and Play Bridge. It also halted trading in affected liquidity pools, withdrew foundation-provided liquidity, and shut down the WEMIX$ module and the decentralized exchange service PNIX.

WEMIX said the cause of the attack and the full extent of the losses are still under investigation, and the preliminary figures may change.