Haven Protocol price plummets 50% amid exploit

Haven Protocol price has plunged nearly 50% after the blockchain protocol suffered a major exploit.

The Haven token (XHV) fell sharply from $0.0003594 to around $0.0001649 as the community reacted to news of a massive attack on the project. Haven Protocol’s team confirmed the exploit via X, attributing the attack to a vulnerability that allowed a hacker to mint XHV tokens.

“Unfortunately we’ve been hit by an exploit. This was identified when querying the amount of XHV on exchanges. The number reported to us is in excess of 500 million XHV. After decrypting the current supply figures from the Audit, the amount of XHV reported is 263 million. This means that the surplus XHV reported by exchanges were created through the exploit, and likely much more.”

Haven Protocol team on X.

According to Haven Protocol’s update, the vulnerability likely stemmed from the “range proof validation” code introduced during the Haven 3.2 rebase to privacy coin Monero (XMR).

Notably, the additional XHV tokens were not visible in the decentralized finance protocol’s audited supply. Developers clarified that the vulnerability was applied after the audit, allowing malicious actors to mint new XHV tokens that were not accounted for during the audit process.

To mitigate the impact of the exploit, Haven Protocol has advised cryptocurrency exchanges to halt trading on all XHV pairs.

Haven’s network uses a “mint-and-burn” mechanism to ensure the untraceability of digital assets. Users burn XHV to generate the synthetic stablecoin xUSD.

Haven Protocol reached an all-time high of $28.99 in April 2021 but has since lost nearly all of its gains, with this recent exploit further compounding its losses.