Most Acala services are still offline twelve days after attack
Important takeaways
- Acala said today that most of its services remain suspended following an attack that occurred on Sunday, August 14.
- Of the 22 services listed on Acala’s website, 18 services are paused while three are operating normally.
- Acala says it is working to restore functionality and restore USD through the tracking effort.
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A majority of services on Acala are still offline, according to a statement from the project today.
The majority of Acala services are down
Acala is still trying to restore operations more than a week after suffering an exploit that collapsed the stablecoin.
The project said today that “many of the services have been paused … including XCM transmission.” This means that cross-chain transfers between Acala and other Polkadot parachains are not currently available.
Various other services are also non-functional. Users cannot transfer most tokens, use bridge services, mint aUSD stablecoin, perform token swaps, use instant unstaking, or engage in the protocol’s various server functions.
Of the 22 services listed on Acala’s support page, 18 services are paused.
Only three services are working normally. The first active service concerns basic on-chain transactions involving the project’s native ACA token. The other two operational services concern staking: both floating DOT posting and normal unbound period posting operate as normal.
Acala was attacked on Sunday 14 August. At that time, the perpetrator managed to mint at least 1.28 billion USD tokens.
The attacker exchanged a relatively small portion of the faulty tokens for other assets. The community quickly noticed the incident; in response, they froze the Acala chain and its services with an “urgent governance vote.”
The freeze has enabled Acala to track, recover and burn around 3 billion USD tokens that have been wrongly minted.
On August 24, Acala said it was still working to track funds. “70% of the transactions involved are still necessary [sic] a track, and this work is still ongoing,” it says. The project offers a bounty to individuals who return a significant amount of funds.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies.
