Vow, a decentralized discount voucher issuer, recently experienced an exploit that significantly impacted its native token.

According to a report, Vow was exploited for $1.2 million immediately after testing a rate setter function on August 13. During the test, the amount of “vUSD received per VOW token was changed from 1 to 100,” which lasted for only 15 to 30 seconds.

Subject: Update on Recent Market Incident and Ongoing Efforts
Dear Community,
We want to clarify the recent incident that has occurred while our team was testing the USD rate setter function of the v$ contract in order to mint v$ for the new lending pool and oracle functions…

During the brief testing period, a bot acquired 20 million Vow (VOW) tokens, worth $6.6 million at the time, and swapped the tokens for Ethereum (ETH) on Uniswap V2. This resulted in a total of 452 ETH, worth $1.23 million.

Vow stated that they are actively working on a fix and have increased the token’s burn rate to 50%. This measure aims to bring VOW’s circulating supply back to its normal level.

Update: MVD Notification of VSR burn rate change with immediate effect
As part of ongoing measures to mitigate the impact of the exploit noted earlier today, the ecosystem priority is to reduce discount vouchers in supply to the pre-exploit state.
For clarity $VOW supply has…

According to Etherscan data, the exploiter still holds the ETH received from Uniswap. Unlike many other hacks within the crypto ecosystem, the attacker did not deposit the funds into a newly-created wallet. On-chain data shows that the attacker’s address interacted with the popular cryptocurrency mixer, Tornado Cash, around four months ago on April 23.

Currently, the VOW token is down by 80% in the past 24 hours, trading at $0.06. The asset’s market cap is now $41 million. The fear surrounding the hack triggered a 1,400% increase in VOW’s daily trading volume, pushing it to the $12 million mark.

According to a report in June, the cryptocurrency ecosystem has lost approximately $20 billion to hackers and scammers since 2011. In the second quarter of 2024 alone, the industry experienced 72 incidents, losing $572.7 million to malicious actors.

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