Social token platform Roll suffers hack: tokens crash

Social token platform Roll suffered a security breach yesterday, resulting in the theft and sale of tokens

Roll, a platform that issues social tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, suffered an exploit yesterday. The security breach resulted in the theft and subsequent sale of the platform tokens, which resulted in a price crash of several tokens.

Blockchain data available on social media revealed that holdings of various social tokens issued on Roll were transferred and liquidated following the attack, while some of the tokens were moved to transaction mixer Tornado.

Analysis conducted by Igor Igamberdiev showed that roughly $5.7 million in ETH were stolen during the attack. The sale of the affected tokens resulted in significant price declines. Tokens including WHALE, RARE and PICA lost more than 50% of their value following the attack. However, RLY, the native token of competing social money platform Rally, surged to a new all-time high.

The founder of WHALE, one of the affected social tokens, shared further details of the attack on Twitter. He said, “Based on the information that we have currently: 1, 2.17% of $WHALE was compromised through a hack on our social token issuer’s hot wallet. 2, All other $WHALE including community distributions are fully secure in cold storage, including the $WHALE Vault”.

He added that they were fortunate that the hack had minimal impact on the project despite the massive liquidity on Uniswap. “We will find a way to absorb this, so it has zero impact on our short, mid and long term growth of $WHALE”, he concluded.

According to a representative of Roll, the project’s hot wallet was the target of the attack. Roll is now looking into a flaw in its hot wallet and will share more details soon, the representative added.

Roll allows the sending and receiving of social money from the Ethereum network and within the Roll network. MyCrypto.com reported that the malicious hacker that executed the hack is now sending 100s of ether to Tornado Cash, a privacy tool deployed by hackers to cover their tracks and withdraw funds.

Cryptocurrency platforms have been prone to hacks since the creation of Bitcoin. Over the past decade, cryptocurrency platforms and trading exchanges have lost hundreds of billions of dollars to hackers.