Mixin Network Losses Nearly $200M in Hack
Mixin Network is a protocol designed to address blockchain scalability issues – at the expense of having a centralized database.
Mixin Network has confirmed a report from SlowMist, a blockchain security consultancy, that it has been hacked for nearly $200 million.
“In the early morning of September 23…the database of Mixin Network's cloud service provider was attacked by hackers, resulting in the loss of some assets on the mainnet,” Mixin Network said in a statement. “The funds involved are approximately US$200 million.”
Mixin Network is a service similar to a layer-2 protocol, designed to make cross-chain transfers cheaper and more efficient.
But the problem with this, as many have pointed out on Twitter, is that it's reliant on a centralized database, creating a single point of failure.
Spot the error: the database of a decentralized network got hacked
— Hope (@btctbtctb) September 25, 2023
According to a monthly report from July, the top 100 assets on the Mixin Network have a value of just over $1.1 billion.
The firm reports that there were 663,489 unique monthly transactions of bitcoin (BTC) and 179,647 ether (ETH) transactions during July.
Mixin Network’s founder is set to address the issue in a live stream later in the afternoon.
Sam Reynolds
Sam Reynolds is a senior reporter based in Taipei. Sam was part of the CoinDesk team that won the 2023 Gerald Loeb award in the breaking news category for coverage of FTX's collapse. Prior to CoinDesk, he was a reporter with Blockworks and a semiconductor analyst with IDC.