GNUS.ai (Genius AI) hack — May 2024

Genius AI, whose GNUS token traded on Ethereum, lost about $1.27 million on 5 May 2024 when an attacker minted counterfeit tokens on a second chain and sold them into the project's liquidity pool.

The attacker obtained the private key to the team's deployment account, an address beginning 0x18. Genius AI's chief executive, posting as SuperGenius, said the key was exposed through a compromise of the team's private Discord messages, writing that "apparently the hackers can watch private messages on discord." According to CertiK, which analysed the transactions, that access let the attacker copy the salt used to deploy the Axelar token manager contract on Ethereum and redeploy the identical contract at the same address on Fantom, where GNUS had not been launched. The bridge treated the Fantom contract as legitimate, so the attacker was able to mint 100 million GNUS there, bridge them through Axelar to Ethereum, and sell them. Roughly 407 ETH was drained from the Uniswap liquidity pool, and the GNUS price fell more than 95%, from about $22.86 to $0.79.

Published estimates cluster closely: CertiK put the loss at about $1.25 million, Cointelegraph at $1.27 million, Protos at $1.3 million.

The team said it would issue a replacement token and pledged $500,000 of ether to its liquidity pool plus $500,000 in locked fees. A researcher quoted by Protos argued the sequence was consistent with a planned rug pull by insiders rather than an outside intrusion; another said the money came from ordinary swaps against liquidity providers, not a contract exploit. No one has been identified or charged.