Web3 music streamer Audius loses $6M in crypto hack

Audius was hacked Saturday losing about $6 million worth of Ethereum-based AUDIO tokens. The 18.6 million AUDIO tokens were re-sold for 705 ETH ($1.1 million) and funneled through a transaction mixing service.

Perhaps the most popular web3-based streaming platform., Audius boasts 6.1 million unique visitors per month. Artists who upload their music to the platform receive audio tokens and as do listeners.

But this week’s hack could shake the confidence of both artists and fans. As if Tuesday afternoon, Audius AUDIO tokens were trading at $0.3043 compared to a one-month high of $0.4257

What happened?

“The Audius governance, staking, and delegation contracts on Ethereum mainnet were compromised due to a bug in the contract initialization code that allowed repeated invocations of the initialize functions,” according to the startup. “The bug allowed an attacker to maliciously transfer 18MM $AUDIO tokens held by the Audius governance contract (referred to as the “community treasury”) to a wallet of their control and modify dynamics of the voting system to illicitly change their staked $AUDIO amounts in the network.”

Things are returning to normal at Audius who is issuing regular statements to its community.

– All remaining funds are safe and fixes have been deployed. At this point all remaining smart contract components have been updated and unpaused except staking & delegation. We expect to have these online within the next couple of days, after changes have been reviewed.
— Audius 🎧 (@AudiusProject) July 25, 2022

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.

Bruce Houghton on 07/27/2022 in NFTs, DAO, Web3, Crypto | Permalink | Comments (0)

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