Initia Pauses Network After $615,000 Security Breach as INIT Surges 60 Percent

Initia has stopped its Layer-1 blockchain for the second time in less than three weeks following an attack through compromised rollup infrastructure keys resulting in unauthorised transfers, while its native INIT token has risen over 60 percent. According to an announcement on November 10, the network stopped generating blocks at 06:18 UTC after the team worked together with the validators to stop any more unapproved transactions. Its initial investigations have revealed that the attackers gained access to escrow wallets holding assets bridged from Initia's main chain to its rollups.

Compromised Rollup Infrastructure Keys Used to Fake IBC Transfers

Before the suspension, there was an outflow of around $605,000 (roughly Rs. 5.6 crore) in USDC and $10,000 (roughly Rs. 9.3 lakh) in other tokens via Noble. According to Initia, most of the remaining funds transferred from the impacted escrow wallets were still present within their suspended blockchain. In their security update, Initia stated that the hacker had abused the rollup infrastructure keys to fake IBC transfers.

The involved escrow accounts possessed assets relating to various rollups that were working inside the Initia ecosystem. IBC allows the connected blockchains to exchange data and transfer assets using the available communication channels. Though the team found that there was usage of the infrastructure keys to carry out the attack, it has not provided any information on how those credentials were compromised.

Security company CertiK noted that it had discovered around $636,000 (roughly Rs. 5.9 crore) in unusual outflows through 16 IBC transactions from Initia addresses to the Noble network. This sum is larger than Initia's initial assessment of about $615,000 (roughly Rs. 5.7 crore). Neither of these statements confirms the final sum of unrecoverable funds, as the investigation is still ongoing. Initia said that it was cooperating with cybersecurity experts, validators, and crypto exchanges to assess the scale of the event.

The native token of Initia appreciated during the same time that the blockchain network faced its second security suspension. According to CoinGecko market analysis, INIT was trading at around $0.2057 (roughly Rs. 1.8), which marked a 61.31 percent rise over the previous 24 hours. The token price ranged from roughly $0.12 (roughly Rs. 11) to more than $0.23 (roughly Rs. 21) during the trading session.

There was a total trading volume of about $84.81 million (roughly Rs. 794 crore) over the period of 24 hours, and the market cap of INIT is nearly $46.37 million (roughly Rs. 434 crore). There is the circulation of around 220 million tokens of the INIT crypto currency, which witnessed an increase of 54.22 percent within a period of seven days.