Twitter user, Spreek, notified the community that Sperax USD (USDs) appeared to have been exploited, losing $250,000.
Per his analysis, the attack drastically inflated the supply of USDs and left no transfer logs that signified minting or moving an endless number of tokens.
The attacker may have taken advantage of a bug in USDs’ rebasing code
The was no evidence of a malicious upgrade of Sperax USD’s smart contract. Accordingly, the investigator believes the attacker might have exploited a flaw in the stablecoin’s rebasing code.
Looks like @SperaxUSD suffered an exploit a few hours ago where the supply of USDS was inflated drastically by a single user. The system has now been paused, but the attacker was able to extract ~250k beforehand pic.twitter.com/6szuqdpUUo
— Spreek (@spreekaway) February 4, 2023
By the time of going to press, the Sperax team had not commented on the alleged hack. However, on-chain records indicate that the attacker stole more than $250K worth of stablecoins before Sperax paused the USDs system.
The team appeared to have paused their system to mitigate against more losses.
Sperax identified the likely address used by the attacker, pinning it as “kochironnosaif.eth”
(Likely) attacker address, aka kochironnosaif.eth pic.twitter.com/Lpc9ZBwTsi
— Spreek (@spreekaway) February 4, 2023
A screenshot of the address shared by Spreek shows that it had a balance of slightly more than 23.5 ethereum (ETH), worth $38,859 at spot rates.
Sperax continues building an ecosystem
USDs is a stablecoin with native auto yield generation available on Ethereum’s biggest layer-2 (L2) ecosystem, Arbitrum. The cryptocurrency is 100% backed by a diversified portfolio of major whitelisted stablecoins, including Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC).
In June 2022, Sperax, the protocol behind USDs, entered a partnership with the investing and trading platform Streetbeat that brought Sperax USD’s 11% weekly yield to Streetbeat investors.
Data from crypto price aggregator CoinMarketCap shows that Sperax USD has a market capitalization of $22.04m, with each token changing hands at $0.99. The stablecoin had a 24-hour trading volume of $2.48m, and its current price is a 1.12% drop from 24 hours ago.
It remains to be seen how news of the alleged exploit may affect the stablecoin’s market value.
The Sperax protocol previously indicated that it plans to increase USDs trading pairs in 2023 and grow its circulating supply and demand drivers.