The Acala network resumed operations on Monday (26) more than a month after a major failure nearly destroyed the project. On August 15, the project team made a mistake and printed $3 billion in stablecoin aUSD. After this failure, hackers managed to break into the network and seize 1.2 billion of these aUSD. As a result, the stablecoin lost its parity with the dollar and practically collapsed. At the time of writing, an aUSD is worth just $0.99, according to website CoinGecko. As reported by the Acala team, there was a community referendum to decide on Stage 1 to resume operations. Network participants voted in favor of resuming operations, which began on Monday. According to Acala, the community voted to resume operations on the network and also decided to burn almost all of the printed tokens. That is, of the 3 billion aUSD issued, the team burned 2.7 billion.
a very expensive mistake
Some blockchain projects have to deal with hackers, but Acala has had to deal with its own developers. A “human error” a few weeks ago nearly killed the entire project. On August 15, DeFi platform Acala published a report explaining how they misprinted 3 billion of their stablecoin aUSD, causing its immediate collapse. At that time, aUSD plummeted more than 99%, reaching a price of less than $0.01. “2nd batch tracking results + summary below. We have mistakenly issued a total of 3 billion USD. Then about 16 addresses claimed the new tokens. With that, the Acala referendum nº 21 burned between 1.292 billion aUSD. Another 1.682 billion obtained after the incident remains at 16 addresses,” the team said. That is, taking advantage of a mistake by the developers, users managed to get hold of aUSD and dump it on the market. While they were profiting, the aUSD price was collapsing, which led the network to decide to stop swap operations, communications between chains and oracles, among other measures. The network has since gone into maintenance mode, freezing user funds to retrieve the “fake” tokens. The community later voted to identify and destroy these tokens, which helped restore operations. However, the aUSD parity remains below $1.
The future of aUSD after mistake
According to Acala’s latest report, the network has a total circulating supply of USD 10,961,589 in circulation. Of this total, a total of 5,837,712 aUSD is guaranteed by the Acala Foundation, which takes care of the network’s maintenance. In addition, the protocol has already managed to recapitalize and rebalance the Acala Swap liquidity pools to pre-crash levels. In this sense, the pools were supported by the Acala Foundation, which donated more than 3 million tokens to guarantee the liquidity of the operations. is ready to resume normal operations,” the team said. However, some assets are still frozen by the community vote, while others are locked in various centralized exchanges (CEX) that supported the aUSD recovery effort. Finally, there is still a portion of aUSD in circulation. Acala is offering rewards of up to 5% to users who return the funds involved in the incident. Read also: South Korea tries to freeze BRL 360 million in Bitcoin from Do Kwon Read also: FTX wins auction of failed crypto bank Voyager with bid of BRL 7.66 billion Also read: DeFi has serious problems of lack of transparency, says Jerome Powell, chairman of the Fed