Romania-born crypto exchange Maiar fully recovers after major attack

The Maiar Exchange, a decentralized exchange native to the Elrond Network, resumed full operations on Wednesday, June 8, almost two days after it suspended operations due to a malicious attack. Elrond’s co-founder and CEO Beniamin Mincu announced in a Tweet that “all funds are safe, all users are safe” but admitted that he and his team had some “super tough 48 hours”.

The attack on the Maiar Exchange, or exploit as it is known in crypto terms, occurred on Monday, June 6, around midnight UTC. A hacker reportedly stole over USD 113 million worth of Elrond tokens (EGLD) from the exchange.

The development team behind the Elrond network and Maiar Exchange decided to shut down the network to avoid further losses and recover the stolen tokens. Beniamin Mincu kept the exchange’s clients updated through his Twitter account, which has over 380,000 followers, most of them Elrond fans.

1/ New Elrond and Maiar DEX update. All hands on deck. Getting close to enabling DEX frontend and API send function. Amazing progress and support from the community. Here's the current status and next steps. — Beniamin Mincu 🔥🌓 (@beniaminmincu) June 7, 2022

The price of Elrond tokens dropped by about 13% after the attack became public, from USD 75 to USD 65, on higher than average trading volumes. On June 8, around noon UTC, Elrond was trading at USD 67, according to coinmakertcap.com.

Since the beginning of this year, the EGLD token has lost over 72% of its value, amid a market-wide selloff that has seen the total value of the total market capitalization drop by over one trillion dollars (to USD 1.25 trn).

The Elrond network, which describes itself as a third-generation blockchain, capable of processing 15,000 transactions per second, was launched in July 2020. The project’s founders are brothers Beniamin and Lucian Mincu alongside Lucian Todea and the development team is located in Sibiu, Romania.

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